VIS FILES Building 3D User Interface Components Using a Visualization Library Bill Hibbard University of Wisconsin - Madison We usually think of visualization libraries and graphical user interface (GUI) libraries as two different things. GUI components have very stylized appearances, represent simple data as opposed to the complex data in typical visualizations and emphasize information flow from user to computer as opposed to the flow from computer to user in visualizations. However, both GUI and visualization libraries are about visual communication between user and computer, and we can think of GUI components as visualizations of simple data that emphasize user interaction. For example, the slider in Figure 1 is a visualization of a real number, and the color table editor in Figure 2 is a visualization of three real functions (mapping pixel values to red, green and blue color components). This column describes an approach to building 3D user interface components using the VisAD interactive visualization library. This is an open source system freely available from http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/visad.html. Procedural versus Descriptive Visualization Libraries VisAD is different from other visualization libraries. Most libraries define method or function calls that applications embed in procedures for explicitly constructing visual depictions of data.
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