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3D Molecules
Virtual Body
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Experimental
VRML
Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) is an internet standard for displaying 3D models on web pages. We use it to enable us to visualise complex structures and data. On these pages you will find some examples of how VRML can be used to provide a new perspective on data and theory.
Virtual Microscope (477Kb)
This simulation shows the power of VRML to simulate a microscope zooming in further and further to show more and more detail on a sample (in this case, a fractal image). You will need a VRML viewer, such as CosmoPlayer to view this file.
C60 Molecule (2.7Kb)
This simple VRML file shows the molecular structure of a Fullerene C60 molecule - more commonly known as a BuckyBall. You will need a VRML viewer, such as CosmoPlayer to view this file. More examples of molecules can be found here
Conetrees view of a filesystem (4.5Kb)
This is a demo of a viewer of a hierachical data structure, a file system in this case. It is a version of the conetrees system developed at Xerox PARC. Conetrees where first developed by George Robertson, Jock Mackinlay, and Stuart Card while at Xerox PARC. Their work: "Cone Trees: Animated 3D Visualizations of Hierarchical Information" was presented at SIGCHI '91 pgs. 189-194. A Cone Tree is a 3D representation of a tree structure. Conetrees have been shown to be very effective information visualization tools for large data sets that are broad, shallow and hierarchical. In a ConeTree representation, the root of a tree (represented by a cube, a sphere, or some other appropriate object) is located at the tip of a transparent cone. The children of the root node are arranged around the base of the cone. Each child can be the root node of a subtree, which is represented in a recursive fashion by a cone whose tip is located at the object representing the child.
In this system if you click on a cone it will rotate to bring the next sub-tree to the front. If you click on its name then the sub-tress below it will appear. If you click on a red blob, then the contents of the file will appear at the top of the page. If you click on F then you will turn depth cueing on and off. Clicking of L1, L2 or L3 will change your viewpoint. There are other examples of conetrees at Millersville University. Although be warned, our file is 4.5k but the file at Millersville University is over 4 Mbytes in size!
Scrolling zoom (1.3+66Kb)
This example, again inspired by work at Xerox Parc, uses a textured extrusion as a lens for looking at an image. The example looks at a 66k jpeg image of the earth, but other images could be substituted .
Globe simulation
Here a modelof the world was generated using VRML and extensive data processing was carried out using perl scripts to identify which access to the site came from which country. This simulation shows accesses for the first 6 months of promotion of the website. The number of accesses from each country were then animated such that the increase with time was shown as a growing bar at the centre of the respective country. This gave a good feel for the geographic location of each of the unique users for the website, however for some countries like the UK and USA more detail was required about the breakdown of access from government, academic and commercial organisations. A second simulation was generated to show the percentage access for each of 4 major areas, UK, Europe, US,and the rest of the world. This was again animated using a slider bar to change time and now bars grew for each of the major domains within each geographical area.
cgi-bin Script examples
Interface to a text based simulation (1.3Kb)
This example shows a frames based interface to a text and file based simulation. The form input is used to generate a control file for the system, this can then be submitted and the results will appear when the calculation is complete. For long calculations the system will poll the results file to see if it has been made, every 5 seconds.