Brown Cave Software History
History of Cave Software at Brown University
3rd party software
- World Toolkit
- Pros: World Toolkit had lots of documentation. It handled synchronization of driving 4 displays in our 1998 Cave. It supported semi-sophisticated graphics such as alpha values and through some mechanism we never understood (though would have liked to) would draw semi-transparent geometries correctly-- normally, semi-transparent geometries are tricky technically to draw because you have to sort geometry back to front. It was scenegraph-based which sometimes was useful and sometimes was a hassle. It could import a variety of CAD models which was useful for some applications like Petra.
Artery and Petra ran on WTK, plus some smaller applications. An early version of CavePainting may have run on WTK.
- Cons: Some visualization ideas we had we could not implement because WTK did not let us control enough of the rendering engine. It went out of business. There wasn't good support for linux at first, and when we moved from SGI to linux graphics computers it wasn't easy to port applications like Artery and Petra.
- Ensight Gold
- Pros:
- Cons: