The Hepvis Class Library for Event Visualization
Paper: 446
Session: A (talk)
Speaker: Boudreau, Joseph, University of Pittsburgh
Keywords: C++, class libraries, graphics, virtual reality, visualization
The Hepvis Class Library for Event Visualization
Joseph Boudreau
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA, 15260
Lucas Taylor
Northeastern University, Boston Massachusetts, 02115
The Hepvis library is a set of HEP-specific classes derived from the
Open Inventor Toolkit for the specific purpose of building
high-quality, interactive 3D graphics applications such as event
displays. These kind of applications have in the past been very
expensive to build. The user interaction with physics objects via the
display is the source of most of the challenge and cost.
Inventor classes encapsulate not only the geometry of objects
comprising a scene, but also a large amount of the interaction between
the user and the scene. The Hepvis library extends Open Inventor with
geometrical objects representing parts of a particle physics detector
and physics objects found therein, like tracks, hits, and vertices. It
constitues a palette of shapes hopefully covering most of the needs of
a typical particle detector. The remaining shapes can be developed as
needed by the experiments and will be accepted into the library if
they are found to be generally useful. The first release of the hepvis
library is scheduled for January 1997.
The library will run on a wide variety of platforms from Personal
Computers to Virtual Reality devices, and the authors aim to achieve
the best performance on all platforms. The hepvis library will speed
up development of full-functionality event displays in an
object-oriented environment and greatly reduce the cost of creating
and maintaining these kinds of applications.
This talk will cover features of the Open Inventor Class library and
of the Hepvis classes, event display programs constructed out of Hepvis,
and the future direction of the library.