Datasets Manual
Datasets are the images and movies that are projected onto Science On a Sphere®.
Who Is This For?
Permalink to Who Is This For?The Datasets Manual provides details of how datasets work with SOS and how you can create your own. Some of the information is useful only if you have a Science On a Sphere®, such as the sections on Real-time Datasets or the Visual Playlist Editor (which is only available on the SOS computer). Other details, such as the section on PIPs, is useful for anyone creating datasets, although you may find it easier to create PIPs with the Visual Playlist Editor.
For a basic introduction to content creation, please read the Content Creation Guidelines first. For information on presentation playlists, check the Presentation manual.
Definitions
Permalink to Definitions- Content
- General term that we use for anything that can be displayed on the sphere and should be stored somewhere in /shared/sos/media. Examples include movies, images, and caption files
- Dataset
- A packaged collection of coherent content, which may include multiple layers, labels, legends, colorbars, captions, and so on
- Texture
- A single static image on the sphere. By default, Science On a Sphere® turns on rotation for textures
- Time Series
- Animates through time and by default doesn’t rotate. Can be an image sequence or an MPEG4
- Image Sequence
- A directory of images that played in sequence
- MPEG4
- The only video format accepted by SOS
- Presentation Playlist
- A collection of datasets grouped together in a list for a presentation
- playlist.sos
- A text file that specifies how a dataset should be displayed on the sphere. Each dataset must have its own playlist.sos file
System Interactions with Datasets
Permalink to System Interactions with DatasetsWhen a dataset is projected on the sphere, you are really looking at four images that have been merged together seamlessly around the sphere. The Science On a Sphere® software splits the images that you display into four disk images every time you load a new dataset on to the sphere. Because all of the work is done by the software automatically, you don’t need to do anything except point the system to where the data is located by creating a playlist.
