User:Ema0010/Cinematic scientific visualization

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Cinematic scientific visualization (CSV) is the visual presentation of scientific data in a way that is typically associated with non-scientific filmmaking techniques including cinematography, lighting, and composition. Cinematic scientific visualizations are often created for purposes of science communication to the general public, e.g. through museum exhibits and documentary films. While based on real data, these visualizations are meant to entertain as well as educate their viewers, communicating science through tangible cinematic experiences.

Differences from traditional scientific visualization


CSV is considered a subfield of scientific visualization, although the creation methods and visual outputs differ due to CSV's heavy emphasis on aesthetics and design. Where scientific visualization aims to utilize data to aid researchers in understanding scientific phenomena and possibly confirm hypotheses, CSV's primary purpose is to be visually digestible and appealing for the average viewer.

Traditional scientific visualization and cinematic scientific visualization differ in a number of important ways:

History
The term "cinematic scientific visualization" was first published by Donna Cox in 2008 referring to work created by the Advanced Visualization Lab and was popularized by Kalina Borkiewicz of the same lab who published a series of papers, conference presentations, and interviews on the topic beginning in 2017. The term is now widely used to describe work done by NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio, Siemens Healthineers , NVIDIA , and others.

'''In 2006, NASA collaborated with Pixar Animation Studios, using their RenderMan Interface Specification API and Autodesk Maya to create animations of various weather patterns and large scale movements across the Earth.  These visualizations allowed for researchers to study and better understand ocean movement during the stages between the weather phenomena El Niño and La Niña.'''

In film
The first large scale broadly-distributed cinematic scientific visualization appeared in the IMAX film Cosmic Voyage in 1996, though at the time this was simply referred to as a "scientific visualization" without the "cinematic" qualifier. '''Rather than focus on aesthetics, the film sought to visualize events such as the "Big Bang" and elements invisible to the human eye such as atoms and quarks. '''

'''Many usages of cinematic scientific visualization are found in science-based documentary style films. Atlas of a Changing Earth for example, used data collected on the Arctic to render a high resolution simulation depicting the collapse of the Vavilov icecap. '''

In 2014, the film Interstellar featured a cinematic scientific visualization of a physically-accurate black hole in a science fiction film. '''This predates the first image of a black hole, Messier 87, by 5 years.  The black hole was rendered using code, Double Negative Gravitational Renderer (DNGR), designed by DNEG specifically for the film.  It took 30 people a full year to create the supermassive black hole, with some individual frames taking over 100 hours to render. '''