Unity Gaia Star Cluster Explorer
This screen-grab movie demonstrates some of the functionality of a Unity project I created to explore Gaia DR2 data in the context of the galactic star cluster population.
This uses the HDR VFX particles in Unity to enable 10s of millions of stars to be drawn (not yet reaching the billions of Gaia, but pretty good!). I tested this with the entire Gaia DR2 radial-velocity velocity sample plus additional bright stars, up to 10 million particles on my Macbook Pro. I suspect we could push it to a much higher number of stars on a different computer (or if you're willing to sacrifice fps). I also included spheres labeling all the open and globular clusters for reference. The user can right-click on clusters to re-center the camera, free fly around the galaxy, or keep the camera orbiting around a given cluster.
You can find project files on my GitHub repo here: https://github.com/ageller/UnityGaiaH...