Canned Visualizations

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The aim of the Canned Visualization project is to allow a user to interactively visualize some simulation data that was produced on a remote host in batch mode, and that is too big to be transfered to and postprocessed on the user's local workstation.

We circumvent the limitation by slightly reducing the interactiveness the user encounters: It is possible to fiddle with the 3d rendering in real time, and it is possible to (say) choose an isovalue interactively, but the choice is limited to a preselected set. By this the big iron can do all the hard work remote and in batch mode while the user still has the illusion (well, not totally) of working with a local visualization system.

The system consists of a quite simple viewer application (yet in existence) and a library that produces the viewer's input (still brainware).

The viewer is written in C++ using TrollTech's Qt library and therefore shares its license. Additionally it uses the Open Inventor as 3D toolkit. It is developed under IRIX, is known to compile for Linux, should work with about any U**x that supports pthreads and probably could be ported to anything that has a Qt (i.e. winDOS) and some Inventor or clone.

The original author is Stefan Meinlschmidt who is paid for doing so by the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.

This project is hosted by the SorceForge. There is also a project summary page you can check out for the bug tracker and all that.