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<title>Overview - Geomview Manual</title>
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<h2 class="chapter">1 Overview</h2>
<p>Geomview's main purpose is to display objects whose geometry is given,
allowing interactive control over details such as point of view, speed
of movement, appearance of surfaces and lines, and so on. Geomview can
handle any number of objects and allows both separate and collective
control over them.
<p>The simplest way to use Geomview is as a stand-alone viewer to see
and manipulate objects. It can display objects described in a variety
of file formats. It comes with a wide variety of example objects, and
you can create your own objects.
<p>You can also use Geomview to handle the display of data coming from
another program that is running simultaneously. As the other program
changes the data, the Geomview image reflects the changes. Programs
that generate objects and use Geomview to display them are called
<em>external modules</em>. External modules can control almost all
aspects of Geomview. The idea here is that many aspects of the display
and interaction parts of geometry software are independent of the
geometric content and can be collected together in a single piece of
software that can be used in a wide variety of situations. The author
of the external module can then concentrate on implementing the desired
algorithms and leave the display aspects to Geomview. Geomview comes
with a collection of sample external modules, and this manual describes
how to write your own.
<p>Geomview is the product of an effort at the Geometry Center to provide
interactive geometry software that is particularly appropriate for
mathematics research and education. In particular, Geomview can display
things in hyperbolic and spherical space as well as Euclidean space.
<p>Geomview allows multiple independently controllable objects and
cameras. It provides interactive control for motion, appearances
(including lighting, shading, and materials), picking on an object,
edge or vertex level, snapshots in SGI image file or Renderman RIB
format, and adding or deleting objects is provided through direct
mouse manipulation, control panels, and keyboard shortcuts.
<p>Geomview supports the following simple data types: polyhedra with
shared vertices (.off), quadrilaterals, rectangular meshes, vectors,
and Bezier surface patches of arbitrary degree including rational
patches. Object hierarchies can be constructed with lists of objects
and instances of object(s) transformed by one or many 4x4 matrices.
Arbitrary portions of changing hierarchies may be transmitted by
creating named references.
<p>Geomview can display 3-D graphics output from Mathematica and Maple.
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