Immersive Visualization / IQ-Station Wiki
This site hosts information on virtual reality systems that are geared toward scientific visualization, and as such often toward VR on Linux-based systems. Thus, pages here cover various software (and sometimes hardware) technologies that enable virtual reality operation on Linux.
The original IQ-station effort was to create low-cost (for the time) VR systems making use of 3DTV displays to produce CAVE/Fishtank-style VR displays. That effort pre-dated the rise of the consumer HMD VR systems, however, the realm of midrange-cost large-fishtank systems is still important, and has transitioned from 3DTV-based systems to short-throw projectors.
ImmersiveVTK
** NOTE: This page is currently unreferenced by the IQ-station wiki, as it is yet preliminary, and thus intended as a means of communication between those working on the effort. However, the page should, as much as possible, be designed with an eye toward being a fully public page. **
Immersive VTK
VTK is a general-purpose visualization library that is widely used by the Scientific Visualization Community. VTK is supported by the commercial company Kitware, Inc.
There are also many general-purpose user-oriented tools built on VTK, including Kitware's ParaView, as well as VisIt.
Recently, Kitware has been supported by Idaho National Lab to add immersive functionality to ParaView. As part of this effort, VTK is also gaining capabilities.
Through now, the focus has been (and still is) on enabling off-axis rendering through the standard vtkCamera class. Future enhancements will include
This page describes how to compile, configure, and run VTK with these extensions.
How to Run Immersive VTK
- Presently, Bill uses a TCL script he wrote that can read the Vrui 1.0 VRDeviceDaemon protocol and then set the eye/head position from the incoming stream.
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How to Download Immersive VTK
Immersive VTK is currently only available as a special git development branch known as "vtk-stereo".
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How to Compile Immersive VTK
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The Immersive VTK API
There are several new methods/values associated with the vtkCamera class designed to enable quick and easy usage of off-axis rendering.
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Immersive VTK Internals
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Outstanding Issues
- The Deering off-axis rendering code still doesn't work.
:-( vtkXOpenGLRenderWindowclass- should have the means to specify which display to render to
- should probably call the
CreateAWindow()method instead ofXOpenDisplay()all over the place.
- Thus the
vtkRenderWindowclass should have a value and method to set the display context that is passed down to the hardware handlers (such asvtkXOpenGLRenderWindow).