Skybox LOD

Some ideas of when to show low res and hi res skyboxes

Show hi res:

-when camera is above 20 Mega Meters height regardless anything else OR

-when camera is above the atmosphere and the camera.direction ray doesn’t strike the Earth OR

-when the camera is in the atmosphere but it’s nighttime (sun altitude is less than -10 degrees.)

Otherwise show low res

Lo resolution skybox (100-200 kilo bytes each)

tycho2t3_80_mx.jpg

tycho2t3_80_my.jpg

tycho2t3_80_mz.jpg

tycho2t3_80_px.jpg

tycho2t3_80_py.jpg

tycho2t3_80_pz.jpg

Hi resolution skybox (500-600 kilo bytes each)

TychoSkymapII.t3_08192x04096_80_mx.jpg

TychoSkymapII.t3_08192x04096_80_my.jpg

TychoSkymapII.t3_08192x04096_80_mz.jpg

TychoSkymapII.t3_08192x04096_80_px.jpg

TychoSkymapII.t3_08192x04096_80_py.jpg

TychoSkymapII.t3_08192x04096_80_pz.jpg

Is there a fast site that hosts these jpg files, or do these need to be stored with each web app?

Hyper,

Currently these are part of the Cesium dev kit so you would host them with the rest of your app. Long-term we plan to support high-resolution sky boxes by tiling up each face of the cube map similar to how imagery on the globe is tiled.

Patrick

Perhaps instead of a cube, it could be set up just like terrain imagery, except that you’d see the imagery from the inside of a sphere rather than from the outside, plus you’d always be stuck in the center of the sphere as even the radius of the solar system is insignificant relative to visible star distances. (Pluto is 7.5 Tera Meters from the Sun, while the nearest star is 40420 Tera Meters from the Sun.) I do believe right ascension and declination line up with Earth’s longitude and geocentric latitude system.

It would be so cool to virtual telescope in Cesium (already can with the Moon), you could then know where a constellation is relative to local mountains. Can’t do that with Google Sky.

Having all of the visible planets to the naked eye in Simon1994PlanetaryPositions.js would awesome as well. Planets such as Venus and Jupiter, as these are planets that can be seen even when there’s still some daylight left, before you can see stars. Perhaps have the feature off by default if it’s taxing on performance. Judging by the name I suppose the data and equations are from ‘Numerical expressions for precession formulae and mean elements for the Moon and the planets’. The data on the Moon, Sun, Earth are quite accurate, using Cesium I calculated that the line from Sun center to Moon center came within 2.9 Mega Meters from Earth’s center at the peak of the Lunar Eclipse on 2015Apr04 120800 UTC.

Having the support for showing images on the inside of a sphere would also allow something like a street view or 360 degree local view of an area in the map.

Imagine the following:

  1. User browses the world like now in cesium.

  2. Small spheres are visible on the map along a road

  3. User clicks one of the spheres and cesium sets the camera position in the center of the sphere

  4. User now has a 360 degree view of this area from within the sphere.

Extending, lets say that there now for each 5meter exists such a sphere the user may then navigate within all these spheres and see the world as being in streetview.

Sounds like the Google Earth Streetview interface they had many years ago. I don’t know why they dropped it, it was a pretty cool system.

Ye, would have been a bit easier to just link to that :slight_smile: Didnt know. Looks cool