VisAD

See VisAD in Booth 533 at JavaOne

Visit us in booth 533. We'll be there giving live demos and answering questions.

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:

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 JDK 1.2 and Java3D. They are not available yet. See Sun's Java web page for more information.

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.

Jar Files for Specific VisAD packages

The classes for various individual VisAD pakcages are available in these jar files: You may need to click the SHIFT button held down to get your browser to load these unsigned jar files. If you still have trouble, get the tar files (each of which contains a single file - the corresponding jar file): See the README file for installation instructions.

Other Information

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

Check out this image stretching applet using VisAD written by Curtis Rueden.

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.

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.