Introducing. . . NDview 1.0

A general purpose viewer for higher dimensional objects

NDview is a module that works in conjunction with Geomview to allow you to interactively view objects in a space of any dimension. NDview runs on Silicon Graphics workstations. This Web document introduces you to some of NDview's features.

If you are new to the visualization of higher dimensional objects, the tesseract (hypercube) demo should provide a useful introduction. If you are new to Geomview, you may find it helpful to familiarize yourself with motion and objects in the usual three-dimensional world of Geomview before moving on to use the n-d capabilities of NDview. The rest of this documentation will assume that 1) you are familiar with the idea of visualizing higher dimensional objects and 2) you can use Geomview's standard controls to view ordinary objects without too much difficulty.

Features of NDview:

Given a description of an object in terms of surfaces (meshes) and/or curves (polylines) which lie in any higher-dimensional Euclidean space, NDview displays arbitrary 3-d projections which you can interactively manipulate in much the same way that you manipulate ordinary 3d scenes in Geomview. The underlying idea of NDview is that we can most easily understand and specify camera and object motion in a higher dimensional space, three dimensions at a time. NDview is built on top of a powerful command language which allows direct control of the underlying matrices used for internal calculations, as well as many other aspects of the viewing mechanism.

Where to get NDview:

NDview is available by anonymous ftp from ftp.geom.umn.edu. Click here to download the compressed SGI version. NDview is an external module for Geomview, a general package for visualization available from the Geometry Center Software archive. If you have any comments, please mail them to me.


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Olaf Holt 3/17/94