CONNECT,
SPRING 1996: SCIENCE AND VISUALIZATION


Developments in Visualization Software:
It's on the Web

by Estarose Wolfson

[Ed: Links to web pages and/or e-mail addresses which have become inactive since the publication of this article have been enclosed in curly brackets { }. Replacement links have been provided where possible.]

For many researchers, the most exciting development over the past year or so is the degree to which the World-Wide Web has become a nearly essential companion tool to scientific visualization and research. Most software systems now have sites on the Web, where information and help with the software can be easily obtained. Interactive e-courses and class syllabi have appeared from universities all over the globe. Research scientists have created sites as well, where their papers from conferences such as IEEE Visualization can be viewed or downloaded at the push of a button. The result is a very stimulating (almost overwhelming) global scientific community where information is easily available at levels of speed and completeness never experienced before.

Many of the new and recently updated software systems available at the ACF Scientific Visualization Laboratory take advantage of the Web in various ways which I will point out below.

AVS (Advanced Visual Systems) has been reintroduced to the ACF's cluster of SGI computers. It is the oldest of the "visual programming" systems. Icons that represent modules -- each module can be a program or sets of programs -- are dynamically linked together to form networks which, when activated, produce a result such as a visualization of the calculation on the underlying data. Many modules are part of the basic system, but over the years an extenxive library of modules written by users has been accumulated in many applications. See http://www.avs.com/ for more information.

DIPcourse (Digital Image Processing course) is an interactive course that uses the WWW and the modular programming software Khoros to teach about digital image processing and the use of Khoros itself. Its home page can be found at {http://www.khoral.com/dipcourse/}.

SGI's modular programming package Explorer has now come under the domain of NAG (Numerical Algorithm Group). The ACF has purchased four licenses for this software. For more information, see {http://www.nag.com/1/IEC}.

Roger Crawfis, Barry Becker, and Nelson Max of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory's scientific visualization group use Explorer as well as SGI's library of 3-D graphics and manipulators called Open Inventor. They have created an excellent home page, offering images, movies, and Explorer modules they've developed in their research related to the visualization of fluid flow. See http://www.llnl.gov/graphics/ for this free software.

GEOMVIEW/OOGL software system from the University of Minnesota's Geometry Center is a very powerful interactive geometry program for visualizing 3-dimensional as well as n-dimensional objects. Objects for use with VRML (WWW's Virtual Reality Markup Language) objects can be built from this program also. See {http://www.geom.umn.edu/software/download/geomview/}

LEDA is "a library of the data types and algorithms of combinatorial computing" and is implemented in the object-oriented programming language C++. See {file:/local/LEDA/leda.html} on the science SGI cluster machines for more information.

The updated VolVis 2 (Volume Visualization) software system has been installed on our computers. VolVis, from Arie E. Kaufman's group at SUNY Stony Brook, and it renders images by using voxel (3-D pixel) data. Voxels are usually obtained from 2-D slice data such as NMR scans. {http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~volvis/vislab.html} Replacement URL: http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~vislab/ discusses this program.

VMD/NAMD is a combination available from theTheoretical Biophysics Group at the Beckman Institute at University of Illinois. VMD (Visual Molecular Dynamics) is shareware available on the Internet. The program renders high-quality visualizations for many of the biological and chemical data formats. Beyond its use for 3-D rendering, it can produce stereoscoptic and virtual-reality images. See http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/. Its companion program NAMD is a parallel program for "molecular dynamics simulations" of large biological systems. This is available at http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/namd/. VMD can be used to interactively display the results of the simulation from NMD.

GASP, developed at Princeton University by David Dobkin and Ayellet Tal, is "an algorithm animation system for 3-D geometric algorithms." It is built on top of SGI's Open Inventor and has been successfully used in a number of computational-geometry video projects. Animations depicting complex algorithms can be created in a matter of hours. I haven't found a Web site for GASP, but there may well be one soon.

For more information, send e-mail to {scivis@archimedes.nyu.edu} Replacement address: comment@scires.nyu.edu or check the ACF's science and visualization Web site at {http://www.nyu.edu/acf/science.html} Replacement URL: http://www.nyu.edu/its/scivis.html. [ C ]


At the ACF, Estarose Wolfson worked in the area of scientific visualization, providing support to students and researchers in this important technology. She has left to join Dr. David Schwartz in the Department of Chemistry as a research scientist on sequencing the human genome.
{estarose@nyu.edu}

Posted 21 February 1996. Last revised 20 May 2004.