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