Re: [Swarm-Support] 3-D Representation

[Artem Baguinski]

On Wed, Jul 16, 2003 at 05:35:34PM -0500, Paul E Johnson wrote:
> I was freaked out there for a minute. I thought you meant somebody 
> produced that 3d picture "graph.gif" with Swarm.  The 3dlib you refer to 
>  implements positional record keeping, but does not do any of the work 
> of drawing the image onto a beautiful picture.
> 
> Has anybody used Swarm to make a 3d picture?

i'm interested in using Swarm in real time 3D graphics software. 

being employed in a new media art lab, i'm interested in finding new
ways of creation "interesting" graphics, audio, text :-) and now and
then i spawn myself in a side projects when i have a hunch that
they can deliver something new.

so, I'm about to start such a new project, just need some time to get
accuainted with swarm. The idea is to visualize swarm based models in
fancy 3D. Since art is my domain I can sacrifice some accuracy of
visualization in favor of fanciness, may be my approach isn't that
useful for serious scientists.

> It seems to me that drawing a 3d picture like that during a simulation 
> would make it really slow, wouldn't it?  If you run a program to draw a 
> picture like that from a dataset, it is usually not speedy...

that picture is way simple for modern (graphics) hardware. although it
depends of course what for parameters are visualized. it is statistics
calculations that may take a lot of CPU, but I'm guessing, if you design
your model taking the stats your interested in into account, you can
optimize statistics calculation and make real time visualization
possible, wether in 3 or in 2 dimensions.

the application may be build that way that stats computations are only
made if stats-swarm is requested (if i got it right that's the way you
deal with GUI in swarm). then one can run simulation without stats /
visualization for some time, save results and restart with visualizer to
see what happenned to the model while (s)he was not looking. [here i
imagine a model that slowly changes in time, like ecosystem for
example].

> 
> Makes me wish there were a blt 3d component we could  hook up.
> 

GNU Maverik is a good GPLed virtual reality library. it's written in object
oriented manner in C, i guess wraping it, or part of it, in Objective-C
could provide swarm with nice framework for realtime 3D visualization.

http://aig.cs.man.ac.uk/maverik/

> If this were my project, I would be inclined to say that the simulation 
> should be in Swarm, but you should output the positional data and make 
> the beautiful 3d picture with some other program that is intended for 3d 
> pictures.  I have a really great commercial stat package called S+ that 
> can do that, and its free cousin R can do it, but not so easily.  I saw 
> some great graphs of that sort in a SAS presentation lately.

If stats you wanna see are really complicated, then this is definitelly
the way too go.