NCI’s scientific visualisations are a valuable tool that enables researchers to gain deeper insights into complex datasets and easily communicate their scientific results.

A still from a scientific visualisation showing cloud, wind and rain patterns for the Maritime Continent region of South-East Asia.

NCI’s Vizlab is a team of specialist visualisation programmers that generate images, videos, and virtual reality experiences that can extend the discovery process for our scientists, and communicate high-impact results more broadly.

Researchers can benefit from seeing their data in a new way, and can more easily communicate aspects of the new insights with scientific peers and the general public.

View their work on Youtube and read about the related research.
 

The team works closely with both researchers and in-house computational and data experts to produce scientific visualisations for the research community. These have a particular focus on weather, climate, Earth Systems science, geophysics, and environmental science, and also cover areas such as astrophysics, materials science and medicine.

By leveraging the large data storage and computational capacity available at NCI, the VizLab team works with datasets hundreds of terabytes in size to create their visualisations. Using a combination of techniques, including video animation packages used in the movie industry and NCI-developed software, NCI’s scientific visualisations are an important and striking element of some of the biggest computationally-intensive research projects in Australia.

Purple visualisation

Drishti

Drishti is a unique open source visualisation software package developed by NCI that allows researchers to explore volumetric datasets, such as tomography and electron microscopy, as images and animations. Drishti is available from NCI’s software repository as installable packages suitable for many popular computer platforms. 

There are a number of additional modes of Drishti. Drishti Prayog is a version of Drishti that allows users to interact with Drishti-generated visualisations on touchscreen displays. A Drishti VR (Virtual Reality) version is also in development.
 

The Vizlab team is open to requests from all NCI stakeholders for a consultation and to explore options for visualisation. Contact us for more information.