VisAD

Learn About VisAD in Course 35 at Siggraph 98

We'll be teaching about VisAD in Course #35 at Siggraph 98, in Room 312 ABC of the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, from 8:30 AM to 5 PM on Tuesday, 21 July 98. The VisAD segments begin at 8:30 AM and at 4 PM. We'll also be in the Computer Applications Lab (CAL) from 11:45 AM - 1:30 PM on Wednesday.

Misprints in August 1998 Computer Graphics article about VisAD

The VisAD article in the VisFiles column of the August 1998 issue of Computer Graphics has incorrectly printed arrow characters ("->" and "<-->") as underscores ("_"). Here is a correct postscript version of:

Introduction

VisAD is a Java class library for interactive and collaborative visualization and analysis of numerical data. It combines: VisAD was written by programmers at the Visualization Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC), and by programmers at the Unidata Program Office.

How to get VisAD

The source code of VisAD is freely available as: You may need to click on the jar file with the SHIFT button held down to get your browser to load it. If you still have trouble, get the compressed tar file. See the README file for installation instructions.

The VisAD Java Class Library Developers Guide is the key document for understanding how to use VisAD. It is available in the following forms:

Other doumentation includes: VisAD is also available as jar files containing compiled classes. The classes of all VisAD packages are available as You may need to click on the jar file with the SHIFT button held down to get your browser to load it. If you still have trouble, get the tar file - it contains one file - the jar file. See the README file for installation instructions.

Prerequisites

VisAD requires Java 1.2 (at least jdk1.2beta3). Displays may be generated with either Java2D (included in Java 1.2) or Java3D. They are available from: the Java Developer Connection.

If you are in Europe

The Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum has offered to serve as a mirror site for our software. The VisAD files are available from this ftp directory.

Collaborative Application Example

Here's a screen snapshot of a collaborative GOES satellite sounding analysis application using VisAD:

The GOES satellite sounding analysis application supports remote collaboration. It serves as a good example of how to build collaborative applications using VisAD and is freely available including complete source code as:

You may need to click on the jar file with the SHIFT button held down to get your browser to load it. If you still have trouble, get the compressed tar file. See the README.paoloa file for installation instructions.

Support for File Formats

VisAD includes support for accessing data in various file formats, including: Here's an interesting astronomical image from a FITS file displayed using VisAD:

Computational Steering Example

The 2-D shallow fluid model lets you experiment with physical and numerical parameters of the simulation and visualize the consequences. It is freely available including complete source code as: You may need to click on the jar file with the SHIFT button held down to get your browser to load it. If you still have trouble, get the compressed tar file. See the README.aune file for installation instructions.

Equinox: an Information Mining Example

Equinox is an information mining tool that utilizes machine intelligence applied to natural language processing to significantly enhance the innovative discovery process. Equinox uses VisAD.

Custom Texture Mapping Example

Lutz Laemmer has created an extension of DataRenderer for customized texture mapping.

Interactive Earth Globe Example

Steve Emmerson has created an interactive globe display of Earth topography and bathymetry using VisAD. It is included in the VisAD source distribution as the visad/examples/Earth.java class. You'll need to download the netCDF topography file into your visad/examples directory (you may need to click on this file with the SHIFT key held down to get your browser to save it on your disk), then run:

  java -Xmx64m Earth lowresTerrain.nc

Image Stretching Applet Example

Curtis Rueden has written an image stretching applet using VisAD.

Other Information

You may be interested in two papers presented at the January 1997 AMS IIPS conference:

The earlier version VisAD, written in C, has been freely available for years and also has a web page.

Getting Help

There is a VisAD mailing list. To subscribe to it send an email message to majordomo@ssec.wisc.edu with

subscribe visad-list

as the first line of the message body. You can also subscribe to visad-list-digest if you only want a daily summary of messages to visad-list. To unsubscribe, send email to majordomo@ssec.wisc.edu with

unsubscribe visad-list

as the first line of the message body.

Check out Unidata's visad-list archive.

To contact the authors...

Email can be sent to Bill Hibbard at whibbard@macc.wisc.edu.

Postal mail can be sent to:

Bill Hibbard
Space Science and Engineering Center
University of Wisconsin - Madison
1225 W. Dayton St.
Madison, WI  53706
If you create extension packages to VisAD we will be happy to add links to your web page describing and serving your extensions.

Disclaimer

VisAD is free software and as such we do not provide real support for it. However, we will be happy to answer short questions and/or help with minor problems (preferably by email).

P.S.

We also have a home page for Vis5D.