September 1st, 1998 - May 15th, 2001
Categories: Software, Tele-Immersion, Visualization
LIMBO / VTK combines LIMBO with the Visualization Toolkit to allow application developers to use the rich set of visualization tools built into VTK to generate sharable three-dimensional objects in LIMBO. VTK was integrated into the CAVE environment and consequently into LIMBO using the vtkActorToPF library.
The provided LIMBO / VTK distribution consists of a tele-immersive environment to load and generate isosurface visualizations of volume data. VTK is used to load the volume data and generate the polygons of the isosurface. A user may instantiate a persistent copy of the isosurface at any time by pressing one of the CAVE wand’s buttons. This persistent copy is distributed amongst all the remotely connected participants who are then able to pick and ove the objects for inspection. Other participants may also join in changing the isosurface threshold to produce more persistent instantiations.
In addition to sharing VTK visualizations, LIMBO can be used to share and visualize 3D models in any of the currently popular 3D file formats such as: OpenInventor, VRML1, DXF, OBJ, etc. This allows external applications to generate visualizations of their data and deposit it inside LIMBO for collaborative visualization.