John Pybus wrote:
Nice idea Julian. What does your system need on the server? Are you making the code available?
Yes, if it can be generalized into a utility we can use for this and for other purposes that we could embed in our application. Behind it technically is OpenMesa, Python, a little bit of C++ functioning through swig to render into the OpenMesa windows, and javascript. I don't know of any other implementation of this idea. It's a complex system of demons and call-backs on the server to keep the 3D model in memory so it doesn't get killed after you grab each frame.
I wonder if by constraining the angles of rotation/elevation to e.g. 10-15 deg steps you could prerender rotated and elevated views to speed up rotation (a la Quicktime VR).
We're experimenting with some animation, but it takes lots of memory. As I said, the animation isn't so vital in my opinion as a system for changing the view to the correct place so you can inspect something closely. That's what this could do very well. It's a slight weakening of the standard 3D visualization concept which merits consideration. Julian T.