Paul J. Rajlich, Polly Baker (NCSA)
Reference URL: http://monet.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~prajlich/astro/
CAVEvis is a parallel, immersive visualization application that supports astronomical datasets (FITS) as well as HDF. The tool represents the integration of two key technologies: the Visualization Tookit (VTK), an extensive and freely available visualization library; and Performer, a high performance 3D rendering toolkit from Silicon Graphics (SGI). The library developed to make these two toolkits work together is called vtkActorToPF. Using vtkActorToPF allows an application developer to harness all of the visualization algorithms of VTK and all of the rendering advantages of Performer, such as multi-process rendering to multiple views (i.e. multi-headed displays such as the CAVE environment). In addition, vtkActorToPF parallelizes the computation of geometry by allowing multiple vtk pipelines in seperate processes to feed a shared Performer scenegraph. CAVEvis is an example application that demonstrates how vtkActorToPF facilitates the rapid development of interactive visualization applications for virtual environments such as the CAVE.