The animation below is a model of the physical dimensions of an air-breathing drone with an overlay of fake scattering points where the radar energy bounces off of it.
The balls are the spots that reflect a significant amount of the signal either horizontally or vertically.
The black cube is the weighted centroid of the various balls. It jumps around because, as the drone changes its azimuth and elevation, the signal returned from the scattering points changes, thereby making the centroid change.
I did this a looong time ago with a package called Rayshade, which is, amazingly, still available at http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/~cek/rayshade/rayshade.html. I'm not quite sure why I'm putting up on my site... I suppose because I recently found a bunch of floppies that I started mining for interesting stuff.
And, although this may not look that interesting, it was my first experience where graphical (as opposed to algebraic, textual, or streaming) data allowed me to understand a phenomenon more completely. For me, algebraic expression has always been much more powerful. But, this project made me view 2d, 3d, 4d, and 5d representations of data with more wisdom.
