REQUIREMENTS FOR A VISUALIZATION SOFTWARE SYSTEM FOR 2010

Xah Lee, 2007-03-16

In this essay, i give a list of requirements that i think is necessary
for a software system for creating scientific visualization for the
next decade (2007-2017).

(for a HTML version with images, please see
http://xahlee.org/3d/viz.html )

For the past 10 years, i have been strongly interested in mathematical
visualization. I'm not a professor, and am not doing it for the
educational purposes per se. Geometry has just been beautiful for me,
and i'm also a professional programer. Programing computers to
visualize geometric theorems or geometric objects, has been a immense
personal pleasure. A particular aspect of visualization, is to design
it so that when viewed, it forces a immediate and crystal clear
understanding of the object or theorem, to its viewers.

It would be interesting to see a computer language include such
functionality from the ground up. If these were core features of a
language, you'd have something wicked cool, and not just a new
language retreading the same features and functionality.

Xah Lee написав:

An interesting essay, of course it is much better to read the HTML
version (with illustrations).

With best regards,

Victor Anyakin
http://vityok.org.ua

Check out pymol.

James

Go for it! I can see immediate application in displaying and
exploring multivariate projections. e.g., factor analyses and
components analysis, multivariate groupings superimposed on projected
hyperspaces... This is stuff some of us have been dreaming about for a
couple of decades, and getting there from primitives has been (ahem)
"fun." To be able to express this and see results using a higher
level language would be really important to a lot of research
exploration.

On Apr 3, 12:23 pm, "Xah Lee" xahlee.org> wrote:
[top posting for clarity]

i have been writing a simulations engine in OCaml
in my spare time over the past few years

it uses openGL as its visualisation engine

it is intended to transform specifications
written in a domain-specific language based on category theory
where the objects are specified by the transformations they
undergo
into "simulations"

i have used the visualisation engine to explore functions

and even posted some of the results

http://tinyurl.com/3262ep

i have also done visualisation in relativistic spacetimes in the past

this included
finite speed of light travel
doppler shift of frequencies / color
and some very basic work in generalised metrics

Xah Lee wrote:

Very nice overview, of what IS and what SHOULD BE.

And I'm very surprised that there's still so little open source software,
in the form a graphical calculator for simple and interactive (2D, 3D, timeseries) math.

As I stepped from MatLab to Python a couple of months ago,
I still had hopes such a graphical visualization tool existed in Python :-(

Xah Lee wrote:

You may be interested in the F# programming language from Microsoft
Research. This is a high-performance functional programming language with
integrated Visual Studio support and an interactive mode (like a
Mathematica notebook).

The F# language is not distributed with any graphical tools except a couple
of example programs. However, you can write a purely functional scene graph
library and compiler in only 200 lines of code and then generate 2D and 3D
graphics (spawned as separate visualizations from an interactive sessions)
with the brevity of Mathematica and the robustness of ML.

I have detailed exactly this functionality in the visualization chapter of
my forthcoming book F# for Scientists:

http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/fsharp_for_scientists/

and I am so happy with the results that we are going to write another book
specifically on the use of graphics from the F# language.