VIRUP : The Virtual Reality Universe Project

VIRUP is a new C++ open source software that provides an interactive virtual reality environment to navigate through large scientific astrophysical datasets obtained from both observations and simulations. It is tailored to visualize terabytes of data, rendering at 90 frames per second in order to ensure an optimal immersion experience. While VIRUP has initially been designed to work with gaming virtual reality headsets, it supports different modern immersive systems like 3D screens, 180 deg. domes or 360 deg. panorama. VIRUP is scriptable thanks to the Python language, a feature that allows to immerse visitors through pre-selected scenes or to pre-render sequences to create movies. A companion video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJJXbcf8kxA) to the last SDSS 2020 release as well as a 21 minute long documentary, The Archaeology of Light, https://go.epfl.ch/ArchaeologyofLight have been both 100% produced using VIRUP.