2 Motivation

Animation, Mosaic's traditional method for visualizing three dimensional data has many drawbacks. The amount of time it takes to download an animation is proportional to the size and number of frames contained in the animation. An animation typically gives some information or tells a story. Unfortunately the story remains the same each time the animation is played. An animator can create a new story by creating other animations or adding more frames to change or lengthen the animation, but both of these alternatives increase download time. No matter how many changes the animator makes to the animation, the user is still left with no control over the plot.

In order to overcome these drawbacks CAVEview needed to be interactive and have a reasonable download time. It had to be versatile enough to allow many types of applications to be ported to CAVEview. A solution was to develop CAVEview as a interface to the CAVE Simulator. By using the CAVE Simulator, existing CAVE applications could easily be converted to CAVEview and consequently the Mosaic environment. Furthermore CAVE application developers would have little or no changes in their code to view their applications in the CAVEview environment.

CAVEview: Mosaic-based Virtual Reality HOME PAGE