Webbased Visualization, Fall'01, Yap

GENERAL INFORMATION

OTHER LINKS

• Here is a link to my Visualization Course from Spring of 1998. (Some lecture notes there are still relevant for this course)
• Great tutorials for GIS data visualization issues: http://www.terrainmap.com/
  SDTS++: a C++ Library for SDTS Format from USGS.

  Active Visualization Homepage at NYU. See some ongoing visualization projects.

  Homepage for Hill's book at Prentice-Hall. You can download the source code from here. This is also available from our homework directory.

  TIGER tools from Active Visualization Homepage.

  OPENGL INFORMATION:
  -- www.opengl.org, the official OpenGL home.

  • Online version of Red Book (OpenGL Programming Guide)
  • Online version of Blue Book (OpenGL Reference Manual)
  • Big List of OpenGL tutorials
  • Big List of Sample Code (including examples from Red Book)

  
  -- OpenGL at SGI.
  -- List of OpenGL Sources from Angel.
  -- Mesa or Mesa3D is a 3D graphics library that uses the OpenGL API, and hence is useful as an OpenGL substitute (Mesa is free).
  -- New OpenGL book by Edward Angel from Addison Wesley & Benjamin Cummings. OpenGL: A Primer. His Graphics Book, also based on OpenGL, is very accessible.
  -- GLUT Tutoral www.lighthouse3d.com.

  Some GIS applications at NYU/ITS. Other links: ArcIMS, an http://www.nyu.edu/its/connect/archives/96summer/loprestipipeline.html> utilities routing application of Dr. Smoritzky.

  Java Networking FAQs

  Cygwin: free port of the popular GNU development tools and utilities for Windows. The environment for our programming is Unix/Linux. We highly recommend this if you want to be in Windows.

  The Walk-Thru Project from UNC (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill); see also the Press Release from NSF. Note that one of our goals is to extend this to a webbased setting. See also: Large Geometric Models at UNC, and the GLVU is a C++/OpenGL/GLUT based viewer.

  Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) studies fluid flows around geometric models (e.g., air flow around a wing). Here, we need to construct meshes (or grids) in the exterior of geometric models. A good representative for such work is Numerical Aerospace Simulation (NAS) Division at the NASA Ames Center. Here is a mesh for a space shuttle model. (data format information).

  Sources for Geometric Models: Large Geometric Models Archive at Georgia Tech. Models from 3D Cafe. From www.3dstudio.com

  Sources for GIS Software Tools: ivtools from Vectaport

  Georeferencing: One of the fascination of GIS datasets is that each data item has a unique reference in terms of latitudes and longitudes. Merging disparate data sets using this common reference is an important problem. But georeferencing problems arise even in logical names. For instance, while the internet gives indiscriminate access to global data, it is often important to filter this access using georeferencing (more generally, spatial and also temporal attributes). See tool of Eric Shaffer at UIUC for mapoing a host name, domain name, or IP Address to latitudes and longitude. E.g. cs.nyu.edu maps to (Lat,Lon)=(40.839,-73.867), in downtown Manhattan while cs.columbia.edu maps to (Lat,Lon)=(40.849,-73.867), in uptown; java.sun.com maps to (Lat,Lon)=(37.388,-122.067) in Mountain View, California.

  Data Formats: PLY File Format from Greg Turk. There is a cygwin-version by Piyush Kumar (go to the cygwin homepage above). Local version of the PLY format description, and PLY tools.

  Some OnLine Applications of GIS

  • MapMusuem from ESRI.
  • FactFinder from the US Census Bureau. It provides access to the 1990 Decennial census, the American Community Survey, the Census 2000 Dress Rehearsal, and the 1997 Economic Census. Information about this project from ESRI.