[Yt-dev] A fun interface for data

[Matthew Turk]

Hi all,

Britton, Cameron, Sam and I were chatting this weekend about a "google
maps" style interface to 2D data, like slices and projections.  We
ended up finding a javascript library that handles it, so I wrote a
simple little script that runs it.

I'd love it if people could download and try it out.  If you have yt
installed, then you don't need anything other than this repo:

https://bitbucket.org/MatthewTurk/yt_map

You just need to change the loading of pf at the top to be a dataset
on your local machine; I'd recommend one with a couple levels of
refinement.  (I really have checked that this works out of the box.
;-)  Once you've pointed it at some other data, just do:

python2.7 run.py

and then open up:

http://127.0.0.1:8080/

On my laptop, I get great performance, and it's even all hidden by the
background-loading of tiles.  The overhead for keeping a very large
projection in memory can be as high as a couple hundred megs, but I
think that's the only impediment to making this accessible on a public
facing webserver.  One could imagine this being used with multiple
tile layers (which is supported by the javascript engine) for each
field, adding in markers for halos/galaxies/star forming clumps, and
then even textual annotations of those clumps.  I think this could be
pretty fun to play with.  The entire code necessary to run this is in
run.py; as you can see, it's super small and very straightforward.
The entire thing is ~60 lines.

It'll also probably get rolled into reason before the yt 2.2 release;
it's really fun to use to explore data!  Any feedback would be greatly
appreciated, either through forking on BB or on the mailing list.

-Matt

PS I have a pretty cool dataset that can be explored with this, which
I'm happy to turn on if you want to explore/experiment without
downloading this to your machine.  Contact me off-list if you do.