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Scientific Visualization with Mac OS X

Posted by pudge on from the she-blinded-me dept.

spectatorion writes "O'Reilly is running this article by quantum chemist Drew McCormack about developing scientific visualization applications using Mac OS X. From the article, 'For those of you not familiar with VTK, it is to visualization what Cocoa is to application development: VTK provides a high-level object-oriented framework which allows you to easily visualize 3D data sets without having to write any low-level OpenGL code.' Definitely a good read for any scientists trying to develop for Mac OS X."

11 comments

  1. Cool by yggdrazil · · Score: 1

    Cool! I've been trying to get VTK running on OSX, but it was kinda hard to figure it out by myself. I look forward to try to port my girlfriend's VTK geographical visualization project over from the dark side (evil empire visual c++).

  2. Quantum chemist? by Graff · · Score: 1, Funny

    I don't know, when I saw the term "quantum chemist" I thought that maybe he was atom-sized and played golf with electrons. Either that or maybe he was stuck leaping through space in time...

    I know, I know, quantum chemistry is a genuine branch of science. I'm a chemist myself but I still can't help getting that image of that tiny little chemist taking a nap inside the s1 orbital of a hydrogen atom.

    --
    Sapere aude!
    1. Re:Quantum chemist? by Graff · · Score: 1
      inside the s1 orbital of a hydrogen atom

      Damn my too fast fingers, I of course meant the 1s orbital. That's what comes of posting quickly and not previewing what you wrote. Oh well...
      --
      Sapere aude!
  3. Really nice tutorial... by torpor · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ... up to page 2 and I'm finding this tutorial to be quite a positive experience.

    I'm no scientist, but I could certainly think of some great, creative uses for this toolkit, based on what I've read so far.

    One thing that comes to mind is to do some sort of visualization app for the various mailing list archives ... sort of a big 'thread view', which would be pretty easy with VTK, it appears.

    --
    ; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
  4. OpenDX also runs on OS X by Space+Coyote · · Score: 2, Informative

    I've been doing some work with OpenDX recently to visualize data collected for some parallel computing projects I've been working on as a grad student. It's an open source visualization toolkit from IBM which runs mainly on unix and Windows (requires an X11 server).

    Anyway, they've recently got it running on Mac OS X and is certainly worth checking out along with the software discussed in the article.

    --
    ___
    Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
  5. No Tabs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    O'Reilly should add tabs support to this as well as virtual desktops.

  6. Good showcase for apple. by jericho4.0 · · Score: 3, Informative
    I thought that article would be a great place to direct any developer asking 'what's so great about OS X, anyway?". It shows of some of the best features of Obj-C, the cleanness of Cocoa, and Project Builder.

    for anyone interested in visualization, check out Open Scene Graph, a fast maturing LGPL project that is well suited to games. (and science/med/etc.) Almost zero documentation , though, but that'll change.

    --
    "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
    1. Re:Good showcase for apple. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Check out also Quesa a mature LGPL replacement for the "Steved" QD3D.
      Mac OS classic ,OS X, Windows, *nix

      Great documentation,

      pluggable importers-exporters - 3DMF, 3DS and OBJ models currently implemented,

      pluggable renderers - OpenGL and rayshade currently implemented, and more