3D Viewer Module

3D Viewer uses Geomview or Open Inventor to display a 3D module of the world from which one can see the virtually reconstructed scene of the world. Geomview version of the viewer is an external Geomview module that communicates to Geomview through stdin and stdout UNIX pipes. The viewer allows a user to select from several different virtual cameras strategically placed in the world to see the observer and target robots.

Current bugs or problems

Geomview seg faults occasionally. Is this a internal Geomview bug or is it because 3d Viewer is somehow causing Geomview to crash?
How to synchronize data between Geomview and 3d Viewer to allow faster communication between the two processes? Currently, a predetermined delay is used for 3D Viewer to communicate to Geomview.

How to execute Geomview version of the module

make sure both geomview and grip3dv executables are in your path. On underdog, geomview is located in /usr/local/bin and grip3dv.sun4 is located in ~dlin/io/grip3dv. On SGI, geomview is located in ~dlin/others/Geomview, and grip3dv.iris4d is located in ~dlin/io/grip3dv. Unix paths must be setup properly in order for geomview to work properly.
copy ~dlin/.geomview into $HOME/.geomview.
run geomview/3dv by typing 'geomview -nopanels -c "(emodule-run grip3dv.sun4)" -b 0.3 0.3 0.3' on underdog or 'geomview -nopanels -c "(emodule-run grip3dv.iris4d)" -b 0.3 0.3 0.3' on SGI workstation.

How to execute Open Inventor version of the module

run ~dlin/io/gripIV/gripIV.iris4d [ server [ port ] ] on any SGI workstation

Revision history

1/30/96 - Initial version
1/1/97 - Reimplement 3d viewer in Open Inventor.
10/9/97 - Added support for UDP connection

Ideas for improvement

Integrate into GRIP program.
Better setup for geomview instead of using .geomview file.
How to run program from the web?
Reimplement 3d viewer in VRML.

Other comments

Geomview/3dv is not very fast due to the asynchronous link between the two processes. Using a model of about 1200 polygons, about 5-10 fps is achieved on SGI and less than 1 fps on underdog.

David C Lin / dlin@cs.stanford.edu

Last modified: Thu Oct 9 19:07:47 1997