Visualization Software                                                               July 13, 2004 (rbb)      

VTK – Freeware. A visualization toolkit which grew out of work at GE and Bill Lorenson’s Laboratory.  Use this if you want to have control of your own software.  http://kitware.com

GLUI – A nice library for easily making a graphical user interface. http://www.cs.unc.edu/~rademach/glui

Matlab – Matrix manipulation software.  It has some very good visualization capabilities.  Go to the on-line help and look for 3D graphics/visualization pages.  There is also a book about doing graphics in Matlab.

GNUPLOT – Freeware.  A command-driven interactive function plotting program. Support: Easy to use and recommended for simple plots.  http://www.ucc.ie/gnuplot/gnuplot.html

CoHort (CoPlot, CoStat) – Inexpensive (~$200) statistical visualization software for scientists. http://www.cohort.com/

Xgobi – Freeware from AT&T, intended for multivariate data visualization.  It focuses on line drawings, scatterplots, and parallel coordinate support.  http://www.research.att.com/areas/stat/xgobi/

 

Vis5D – Freeware.  Academic software from University of Wisconson, primarily developed for atmospheric scientists.  Good support of time varying, 3D data. http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/vis5d.html

 

Amira – Commercial (~$3000) product that has a very friendly user interface.  This product contains good implementations of most visualization techniques. http://amira.zib.de/

 

AVS (Application Visualization System) – Commercial interactive tool for scientific visualization.   Based on a dataflow paradigm.  Analysis and rendering modules are provided, and the scientist makes a pipeline to create their application. http://www.avs.com

 

OpenDX (DataExplorer) – Originally a commercial product from IBM research.  Now it’s open source, called OpenDX.  Same dataflow architecture as AVS.  http://www.research.ibm.com/dx/

 

IDL (Interactive Data Language) - A Commercial (~$3000) scientific data analysis system.  Contains most every algorithm needed for linear systems, ODEs, PDEs, Image Processing, 2D & 3D plotting, surface and volume rendering.  http:// http://www.rsinc.com/idl

Rachael Brady, rbrady@duke.edu D212 LSRC (919) 660-6563