The COVE effort researches interactive visualization capabilitities to aid scientist and engineers in the design and construction of ocean observatories. Central to COVE is a fast, multi-resolution terrain engine that can incorporate a broad range of bathymetric data sets. On this terrain one can overlay multiple images, textures, color gradients, and measurement tools to help visualize ocean observatory sites. For site layout, there are intuitive interfaces to add, position, and determine interactions of instruments as well as cabling requirements. Data sets are visualized to aid the layout effort including earthquake events, oceanographic models, video data sets from past cruises and GIS layers.
COVE provides visualization of stored and realtime data, with-in a shared framework to enable collaborative ocean science.