www.gfz-potsdam.de

Tangible 3D printouts of scientific data volumes with

FOSS - an emerging field for research Peter Löwe¹, Jens Klump¹, Jens Wickert², Marcel Ludwig², and Alessandro Frigeri³ ¹ Centre for Geoinformation Technology, GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Potsdam, Germany ² GPS/Galileo Earth Observation, GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Potsdam, Germany ³ INAF-Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica · Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology IAPS, Rome, Italy

Contact: ploewe@gfz-potsdam.de

3D printed Handpieces for Science Communication

Researchers need to communicate their findings both within Academia and towards the general public. This requires the interpretation of scientific data to reach the intended audiences. Since the rise of Geoinformatics, this task is often accomplished using computer based visualisations, ranging from animated movies to immersive virtual reality environments. 3D printing enables the creation of tangible representations of scientifc data, adding haptic perception as a channel for science communication, based on a rapid and affordable production process.

Towards a Scientific 3D Printing Process

The production of a tangible representation from a scientific data set is the final step of a larger process, linking the physical world and scientific reasoning: The process starts with an observation resulting in a geo-referenced data set. This data is turned into a volume representation for the printing device, leading to the creation of a 3D printout. Finally, the new 3D specimen has to be linked to its metadata to ensure its scientific meaning and context (Figure 2).

Free and Open Source GIS for Scientific 3D Printing A novel workflow based on the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) tools GRASS GIS and Paraview to convert scientific data volume into printable data formats has been developed by GFZ Potsdam. An extrusion deposition printer (RapMan) is used to create tangible scientific data printouts.

Application Fields

Tangible 3D printouts are used in several applications in Geography, Geology, Planetology and Tsunami Simulation: The initial motivation was quality assessment on tsunami simulation data sets in the FP7 TRIDEC project (www.tridec-online.eu). For this, 3D printouts of space time cubes of tsunami wave spreading patterns were produced. Other applications involve high resolution land surfaces (Figure 1), geologic layers (Figure 4) and ice deposits (Figure 2). Additional application fields are currently investigated.

Figure 2: A 3D print of the north polar cap of Mars (left) was produced based on a volume model produced by the italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) based on ground penetrating radar from the SHARAD and MARSIS sensors (right)[Frigeri 2012].

Figure 4: 3D printed stack of the underlying geology of the eastern german basin. The 3D prints depict permocarbon volcanics (red), Rotliegend sandstones (brown), permian Zechstein (blue), triassic Buntsandstein (purple), upper cretacious (green), and quaternary deposits (yellow).

Figure 1: 3D print of a landscape surface derived from a Laserscan Digital Elevation Model.

Figure 3: The 3D printing process for science data: Starting with a scientific data set, a printable representation is derived, resulting in the 3D printout. This printout must be connected to the metadata of the original data and the printing workflow.