[rescue] A productive weekend...

[Joshua Boyd]

On Sun, Jan 18, 2004 at 08:28:54PM -0500, Matthew Haas wrote:

>  Most definitely.
> 
>  In our Distributed Computing lab we're going to be obtaining a 4xR4.4k
> Onyx with InfiniteReality graphics, and I've got an Indigo2 that I use as
> my primary box that I intend to play with these on.
> 
>  Trick is how we're going to get it interacting with our non-SGI equipment
> and other visualization devices (such as our tiled display wall):
> 
> 	http://cs.geneseo.edu/~mth2/dslab/

Sounds like you guys have some nice toys.  Are you going to look into
driving the wall with the Onyx?  On the RE2 unixs, it would have been
easy enough to do using the MCO option.  I know there must be something
similar for IR, but I'm unfamiliar with what it would be exactly. 

> > There are some applications that support these out of box, but I'm
> > having trouble thinking what they might be, other than probably Iris
> > Exploreer, and OpenDX.  I know of a few libraries that support them, but
> > they are costly.  I wonder if Crystal Space supports them.
> >
> 
>  We've been looking into OpenDX for a while, glad to hear it may have
> support for these.
> 
>  Aside from general visualization tools, any neat demos (molecules to spin
> around, 3D space/flight simulators, etc.) that we can come up with can
> help to impress those who otherwise wouldn't understand what is going on
> (and may be in charge of spending money).

Well, FreeWRL supports some amount of stereo display hardware.  See
http://freewrl.sourceforge.net/ 
That it is VRML means it would be really simple to generate content.

Also, have you looked at the VTK toolkit from G&E?  It can do
visualization, but it can also process data to from input file to output
files, so you can always use it to do processing, then output to VRML.

Also, there is a library that lets your OpenGL programs seemlessly use a
network of machines driving a wall.  Have you looked into that?  I
forget the name at the moment, but I can try to dig it up.  I mention it
because I kinda got the impression that you were trying to drive a lot
of displays from one machine (since you mention 15FPS using mplayer on a
P4).  Ahh, here we go.
WireGL(http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/software/wiregl/index.html) and
the Chromium project (http://chromium.sourceforge.net/).

I'm sure there must be some flight sim stuff.  If nothing else, raid the
USGS for geographic data, use VTK to process it into something FreeWRL
can handle, and then write some VRML scripts to add other air planes
flying about.  Though, something better than FreeWRL might be better for
high performance stuff like this.  OpenGL Performer used to be typically
used, and there must be something similar for networks of PCs running
linux. 

You must have a lot of fun.  I somewhat envy you.