Polar Vertex is a project for experimental visualization developed by Almar. Primary goal: To make scientific data visualization easy and accessible. All visualizations have been made in Unity (rendered real-time) covering vast amounts of data.

Ideas? Send an e-mail! pvx@persistentralities.com. Also check my main site.

Energy labels of Dutch houses

Visualizing energy labels of various cities in the Netherlands using open data, and BAG 3D buildings. (February 2024).

July 2023 temperature extremes

This animations shows the number of days (in July) the temperature has exceeded the average max temperature. Data from Copernicus (ERA5) (October 2023).

Dutch electricity infrastructure

Visualizing the different voltage level networks of the energy infrastructure in The Netherlands. (November 2022).

GOES-16 HD video

Animation using GOES-16 ~2TB of satellite data, showing various natural disasters in 2021. Data fetched from AWS (June 2022). UltraHD version can be seen here.

"Wind fur"

Experimental visualization of global wind using a fur shader. (March 2023).

Air traffic visualization

Various experimental visualization techniques for days of air traffic data. Data from OpenSky Network (January 2022).

A year of river discharge (Europe)

Visualizing river discharges in 2020 using various techniques. Data from Copernicus climate data (August 2021).

Road development (the Netherlands)

Visualizing road development in the Netherlands using data from Nationaalwegenbestand. (May 2021)

Sea ice thickness (north)

Experiment to visualize changing of ice thickness over time using different approaches. Data from CMEMS. (January 2021)

AIS Transponder data of U.S. Coast

Visualization of marine traffic of one month around the U.S coast. This data is available through Marinecadastre.gov. (December 2020)

Public transportation of a Monday

Visualization of bus, tram and train GPS locations on a Monday morning! This data is available through NS and NDOV. (November 2020)

Optical aerosol 500nm

Wild fires, hurricanes visualization using ray-marching techniques, data from ECMWF Near real-time.
(October 2020).

50 years of tropical storms

Based upon the National Hurricane Center storm track archive, visualization of 50 year of storm tracks.

Ocean currents

Visualization of ocean currents (from CMEMS) during various seasons. GPU line generation and compute shader for integration.

3D soil lithography

Visualizing the GeoTOP soil layers (100mx100mx0.5m) using geometry shaders.

Age of buildings in the Netherlands

Visualizing the urbanization of the Netherlands using OpenStreetMaps building=* data. All buildings rendered in one view.

3D voxel cloud visualization

Using data from Copernicus Climate Data Store to render cloud depth layers in 3D, using voxels.

Train network visualization

Train engine and network visualization a single day of the Dutch train network. Data fetched through the NS-API.

Australia bushfires

First animation that started the Polar Vertex journey: Visualization of Australian bushfires - January 2020. Using VIIRS dataset.