SCEC-VDO
========
Description
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SCEC-VDO is a product of the Southern California Earthquake Center's UseIT internship program (Undergraduate Studies in Earthquake Information Technology). It is plugin-based visualization software for displaying and manipulating earthquake hypocenters, fault models, and various other earthquake related datasets in 3 dimensions. Earthquake scientists, educators, media, and the general public may find SCEC-VDO useful.
SCEC-VDO was created from scratch by approximately 20 each summer starting in 2004. I worked on it during the 2005 and 2006 summers, as well as throughout the year between summers.
Technical Details
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SCEC-VDO is written entirely in Java using J2SE and Java3D. It is plugin based and open source, so it is very easy for 3rd party developers to modify and add new features.
Most of my work on SCEC-VDO has been related to obtaining data dynamically via Internet web services.
* created a set of location services to allow the user to orient himself relative to latitude/longitute coordinates, cities, street addresses, GPS receiver data, etc.
* added ability to download from the Internet and display satellite images, topographic maps, and 3D relief imagery via [TerraServer Web Services](http://terraserver.microsoft.com/webservices.aspx).
* added ability to "geocode" street addresses into coordinates via the [geocoder.us](http://geocoder.us/) web service and search for cities and landmarks via the TerraServer Web Services.
* added ability to download and filter several different large catalogs of earthquakes from the SCEDC [STP](http://www.data.scec.org/STP/STPdocumentation.html) service.
* integrated STP service with existing earthquake catalog plugin to be able to use downloaded catalogs the same as local catalogs.
* refactored and commented large portions of the earthquake catalog plugin and other plugins.
* created several plugins, including the satellite image, plate movement, and location plugins (see below).
Download
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* SCEC-VDO Beta - [download page](http://scecdata.usc.edu/scecinterns/index.php?title=SCEC-VDO_Downloads)
* SCEC-VDO SourceForge [project page](http://sourceforge.net/projects/scec-vdo/)
Plugins
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In addition to collaborative work done with other interns, I created several plugins from scratch to add more functionality to SCEC-VDO, including a satellite image plugin, and a plate movement plugin, as well as a GPS/location plugin.
Please visit [this page](http://scecdata.usc.edu/wiki/index.php?title=SCEC-VDO_Plugins) for installation instructions.
### Satellite Images Plugin ###
The Satellite Images Plugin downloads and displays aerial and satellite photos (as well as topographic and shaded relief maps) from the [Terraserver web service](http://terraserver.microsoft.com/webservices.aspx).
* [Download Satellite Images Plugin](http://www-scf.usc.edu/~tlrobins/scec-vdo/plugins/satelliteimages.zip)
This plugin requires an internet connection.
### Plate Movement Plugin ###
The Plate Movement Plugin displays data from a [network of GPS stations](http://sideshow.jpl.nasa.gov/mbh/series.html) which measure the movement of the earth's crust.
* [Download Plate Movement Plugin](http://www-scf.usc.edu/~tlrobins/scec-vdo/plugins/platemovements.zip)
### Location Plugin ###
The Location Plugin, formerly known as the GPS Plugin, is now included with the SCEC-VDO distribution. It provides the user with several methods to add location points and labels, including geocoding of street addresses, searching the Terraserver cities and landmarks database, raw coordinates, etc. It now includes GPS recevier connectivity via the open-source [gpsd](http://gpsd.berlios.de/) project.