Software Tools

2D/3D

GL/OpenGL libraries
standard on SGIs
many third party ports cost money
Mesa free: Unix, Linux/FreeBSD, Windows
for only 2D not a bad learning curve!
GLUT
simple windowing API (no dealing with XWindows!)

2D

Tk
tcl/tk, scheme/tk, */tk...
Ousterhout book
very popular, lots of PD source and help
new Netscape plugin sounds cool
Forms
very nice free UI toolkit for SGI
XForms
port of Forms to standard Unix, including Linux
includes perl bindings
Java
not recommended if you don't already know it
raw X
not recommended if you don't already know it
gnuplot
probably not powerful enough

3D

Open Inventor libraries
standard on SGI
available for money on other Unix systems
higher level than GL: esp. good for 3D widgets
Geomview
3D display for other running programs
support for hyperbolic geometry and projection from higher dimensions
vtk: Visualization Toolkit
C++ library with tcl bindings
excellent documenation: book available
many sciviz classes available
big sciviz dataflow packages
AVS, Explorer, Khoros
expensive
might try the new Oorange package

Tamara Munzner
Last modified: Fri Nov 8 12:01:24 PST