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Open 3D Scientific Visualization Toolkit
Mark Leaman writes "The Science Museum of Minnesota has just announced an online community site for scientific visualization, including thier Open 3D Visualization Toolkit that includes Blender and the GIMP as part of the core development tools. Frustrated with a lack of consolidated resources and discussion about open-source, scientific visualization development tools, the Science Museum of Minnesota's Learning Technologies Department decided to develop their own."
Take that, photoshop @ windows!
These museums, with very few exceptions are almost purely supported with government funds. They just can't make back the cost of upkeep, much less salaries, on the few dollars they make through admission fees.
There are a few that can make ends meet by appealing to private business, but for the most part these museums are supported with public money.
Now the point of all this government talk is that sometimes it takes the government to do something good and worthwhile for the general public. If it were up to the private sector, such an undertaking would 1) not have been undertaken in the first place and 2) if it were developed, it wouldn't have been released as OSS.
Hooray for these hackers! And thank god they've got an enlightened government supporting them.
Right now they're visualising squat:
/Users/silver/Sites/visualize/includes/database.my sql.inc on line 31
Warning: mysql_connect(): Too many connections in
Too many connections
LOL!
Incedentally, there are "Warning: mysql_connect(): Too many connections in /Users/silver/Sites/visualize/includes/database.my sql.inc on line 31
Too many connections" to the database about that tool. Suppose we've \.ted it!
Billy
Shout outs to Prairie Home Companion...that old geezer must have a long d.
oops. I hope they're not using the default MySQL configuration.
All you need for true AI is a 3d engine with physics and a large vocabulary of nouns(linked to visual objects) and verbs(actions). It would be monumental to piece together though.
more on ai
www.geocities.com/James_Sager2
Where is the repository for open scientific data for visualization? The NASA website of raw data decoded from the streams sent by our probes? The USGS GPS models? CAT/MRI scan files from dead people? X-ray crystallography data from public research institutions? Their CD distro is a good start, with models from their Turkish dig site. Without data, this tool is just a toy.
--
make install -not war
mod modded you redundant because it took you so long to notice the /.ing, but anyways VRML is a proprietary, closed model owned by the likes of sony this is about open source tools and methods... .sumo file
What you Meant to ask for was a
This the point where I remind people of OpenDX, which is the open sourced IBM Visualization Data Explorer. DX used to be an extremely expensive commercial product, but it's been open source for a couple of years now.
It's very good. If you're into scientific visualization it's worth examining.
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There are toolkits available for 3D visualization that are open source. I used a couple for some work in a seminar a year or so ago. http://www.vtk.org and http://www.itk.org (owned, pretty obviously, by the same people). Their principle application has been in medical work, but I used the segmentation and registration data to begin some work on tracking torsos in video.
Proprietary? VRML is an ISO/IEC standard.
Does it have a spell checker too?
realkiwi
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Until you wake up and have to do graphics for a *living*.. Not just simple hobby stuff at home.
Don't get me wrong, GIMP can do nice things, but it does not replace photoshop for professional production work.
Will it someday ? Who knows.. just not today.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Sorry, but I fail to see what Blender and the GIMP have to do with real scientific visualization. Blender is for 3D modelling, and the GIMP is for image processing.
If you're looking for complete, open source scientific visualization and data analysis packages, try VisIt, which supports dozens of input formats and runs on Linux, Windows, and MacOSX. Pick it up at http://www.llnl.gov/visit, or get the latest binaries from FTP here.
I have less knowledge of ParaView, but it is also free: http://www.paraview.org.
Both of these are also developed in part by the national labs; they can run parallel to handle terabytes of data, so if you've got small dataset they should be smokin' fast, and if you've got your own cluster you should be able to visualize some huge data.
If you're looking for just a toolkit to build your own application, try OpenDX or VTK.
Well, in the greatest tradition of ./ fashion, I the server is overwhelmed, complaining, and I do not get to play... yet ;-)
I look forward to seeing what they have developed. When I started coding a spatially-explicit multiscale modeling tool 5 years ago I searched for weeks to find visualization tools, interchange formats, etc. Imagine the ability to attach submodels to multidimentional representations over time. Now try visualizing them.
Oh, I cannot wait to play.
Open-source Visualisation software:
Counter-examples:
Scroogle
Roy, my dear boy.
Judging from the horrifc, bastard, eye-squeezing graphics on your website, I shouldn't think you're in any position to judge what Photoshop can or cannot do.
The GIMP doesn't even kick PaintShopPro V4's ass.
can they visualize the /. effect? No, seriously, I'd like to see the traffic patterns on a time scale and do some chaos theory calculations.
"I" before "E" except after "C" or when sounded like "A" as in neighbor or way. But their weird and either, foreign seize neither, leisure forfeit and height are exceptions spelt right.
This is another way of starting a sig with this and ending it with that.
I think OpenDX is a bit more than just a tool-kit. It also has a great GUI for doing visualization, without the need for too much coding (somewhat analagous to LabView, I suppose). I have found I really like MayaVI, which is a GUI for VTK. MayaVI/VTK are python scriptable, which is great.
I don't have mod points to make up for this injustice, but I think this is a really good point. I haven't RTFA because it's down, but that's the first thing I would have looked for too. It really surprises me that there already isn't an open standard for this. A universal 3-D format for viewing molecular structures would be ideal for chemists. Something that could go on a website and visitors could look at whatever angle they wanted, or dropped into a PowerPoint presentation (or preferably Impress, but if I go and start complaining how ingrained M$ is in my field I'll really get Off-topic). I mean it's not like there aren't a million solutions to visualization when you're sitting there at your computer, mostly involving expensive propietary software, but also a fair share of free (both sense of the word) options. But at the end of the day, you can't assume most other people have your program (largely because Microsoft doesn't make one), or you don't want to drop out of the middle of your slide show just to show an rendering of your molecule and you're back to picking one (or a few) viewpoint(s) and making .pngs
Actually there is an open viewer for molecules. It's called Rasmol http://www.umass.edu/microbio/rasmol/ and many source files can be downloaded from their site.
This is more what I'm talking about, except I'd like it to be as ubiquitous as .gif or .jpeg: so that I can right click it, save it to my desktop, drop it into a presentation (with proper citation of course :-)). Right now it just seems too...specialized I guess. It's a whole java applet that takes care of the visualization, not just a data format. I dunno...maybe I'm being too picky. At least there is some kind of option. It just seems like the technology is all there for a simple, straight forward 3-D standard, it's just a matter of getting it all together and a critical mass of people using it so that most 3-D visualization programs would have an option to output to that format, even if it means loss of some information, and programs that can embed graphics would be expected to be able to embed the format. To extend the .png analogy: if you made a pretty picture in the GIMP, you wouldn't normally bother to post the original .xcf file. Even if you didn't mind people taking your work and modifying it, it just wouldn't be a safe assumption that most people viewing your website have the GIMP or even know what it is. And how many will bother to install it just because you included a link to http://www.gimp.org/? Instead you'd convert to .png and post that. Yes you lose some of the original information when you do that and if you go back to .xcf, you won't have the original layering etc, but then it's also a safe assumption that most people just want to see the picture and aren't interested in the original source.
I really like this muesuem, it's a good asset to my state. The exhibits are usually pretty nice.
It does have corporate benefactors as well as individual memberships. The whole thing was started by business. As far as I know it doesn't use much public funds.
It even built a very nice new facility in 1999. This museum does more than earn the cost of upkeep.
SCIRun is released under a BSD license and comes with several medical related datasets.
As a geophysicist, I've been looking for a simple tool for manipulating 3d datasets. Many of the field surveys I conduct result in data sets consisting of X(Usually UTMeasting), Y(usually UTMnorthing),Z(depth-either from surface or absolute), and a list of values. (physical properties - conductivity,chargeability, etc)
So far I haven't seen anything that will grid this data well in 3 dimensions - most software I've used ends up making 2-d slices and then laying them side by side rather than making a proper 3-d matrix. I would rather have a proper 3d grid with colour/transparency levels based on the property values I can orient in realtime. When I see the rapid realtime 3d processing in games and compare it to the slow 2-d gridding in commercial geo software I end up shaking my head...
Watashi wa chikyubutsurigakusha desu.
If you're not familiar with the history of the open-source 3D modelling tool known as "Blender," I highly recommend taking 5 minutes to read about it here: http://http//www.blender3d.org/cms/History.53.0.ht ml It's a great story of how this particular set of proprietary code escaped to the freedom of open-source under the GNU Public License. (With a little help from an incredible fan-user base.)
This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bo staff.
I've tried all of the 3d-viz programs and they are all gigantic unwieldy albatrosses. They are gigantic in size and only deal with custom file formats.
:http://www.pythonemproject.com/animabob-cygwin-1. 1.t
Enter Animabob. You can take a simply 3 dimensional matrix, dump it to an output file, get a color map, then just run Animabob on the 3d matrix. Its incredibly simple. The rest of these programs I abhor require custom file formats and various other crap to get them to work.
Animabob just requires an x, y, z matrix dump to work!
Its available at : http://www.borg.umn.edu/~grant/AnimaBob/
I also have a gnu tools version that works on Cygwin. Get it at:
gz
Have fun. Rob
ps. I am looking for someone to update this OpenGL app so that the frame rate is not tied to the video card.
As it is the newer video cards run it so fast as to be almost unusable.
Have you tried Partiview? It's pretty good with those kinds of datasets - I use it for 3d scatterplots a lot. And you can change the colors of points by whatever attribute you want, and spin the data around smoothly in realtime - I can do that with a quarter of a million points on my laptop with a GeForce Go5200, and probably more if I tried.
My Sig fried. Don't leave your Sig in the sun too long.