UK AVS+UNIRAS User Group
Annual Conference 3/4 November 2003
Programme

Monday 3rd November - AVS Visualization Seminar

Tuesday 4th November - UAUUG User Group Day

Speakers:

Dr Samantha J. Baxter, Lecturer in Soil Science,The University of Reading School of Human and Environmental Sciences
Using Gsharp to Map the Spatial Variation of Soil Properties
The environment extends more or less continuously in two dimensions. Its properties have arisen as the result of the actions and interactions of many different processes and factors. The environment, which is an outcome of these processes, varies from place to place with great complexity and at many spatial scales. The information on environmental properties is generally restricted to small areas or volumes of the survey area for economic reasons therefore suitable interpolations methods are required. Geostatistical methods can be used to interpolate, for example, soil properties at unsampled sites. Such sophisticated methods produce large sets of values with spatial co-ordinates. Appraising columns of numbers provides no clues as to what spatial patterns are present: they need to be displayed as maps. Gsharp has been used and evaluated for mapping soil properties. Its advantages and disadvantages will be discussed using examples of soil maps used for local agricultural management within fields and at the national scale for monitoring environmental change.

Ian Curington, Visual Technology Services, Ltd.
Novel User Interaction and User Interface Techniques
New immersive environments require that we re-think traditional user interface assumptions. A menu system for virtual reality and immersive stereo applications is described that allows for rapid prototyping, and 3D-layout behaviour management - all without leaving the immersive environment. The VRMenu user-interface toolkit exploits the AVS/Express 3D viewer design and builds on the basic idea of constrained transformations. In addition, novel ways of designing and implementing new user-interfaces involving 3rd party UI systems such as JAVA and Qt are discussed.

Jean Favre, Swiss Centre for Scientific Computing
AVS/Express at the Swiss Centre for Scientific Computing
Our most versatile visualization environment, from Meteorology to Molecular Dynamics.
With over 15 years of combined use of AVS/Express, the visualization staff at the Swiss Centre for Scientific Computing plays a major role in leading the national activities in visualization. We will present two projects of international resonance in two very different fields of numerical simulation. First, in support of the Swiss Meteorology Institute, we developed a production system which supplements the daily weather forecast with a new module implementing Lagrangian-Eulerian advection of textures of wind velocity data. The technique is sufficiently generic to be applied to any time-dependent vector field solutions. Thus, in the second part of the presentation, we will show how we can use it also for the visualization of electronic currents in molecular systems; this is one of many new tools we have integrated in our AVS/Express environment to support a world-renowned group of scientists in molecular dynamics. From Meteorology to Molecular data, AVS/Express remains the workhorse of our production environment, thanks to its overall strength in graphics, rapid prototyping support with V, and ease of integration.

Peter Kelly, Advanced Visual Systems
Company Update on technology and future release plans
The latest technology advances from Advanced Visual Systems will be covered in summary form and an indication of the future directions and capabilities that the company aims to take graphics and visualization.

James Perrin, International AVS Centre
PST: Parallel Support Toolkit
Creating a parallel processing framework for AVS/Express for users and developers.
One drawback of both AVS/Express and MPE is the lack of support for parallel computation. The Parallel Support Toolkit (PST) being developed at MVC aims to remedy this limitation with the development of a framework for heterogeneous distributed computation and an extensive suite of performance visualization modules. The framework will integrate control of data decomposition, distribution, large dataset handling, level of detail, data streaming and asynchronous computation for facilitating computational steering.

Sharath Reddy, AVS UK
Using Gsharp Scripting Language (GSL) to create Desktop and Web based graphics using Gsharp.
This presentation will introduce the audience to the basics of the Gsharp Scripting Language (gsl) with a view to using it in batch scripts and driving both the interactive Gsharp package and the Gsharp Web engine. The language syntax specifics will be introduced including control flow, together with useful tips for writing your own scripts. Script building with Gsharp is often accomplished by using the Gsharp Professional Edition GUI together with writing code for specific tasks in an editor. This will be reflected in a live review of the features of gsharp itself and how it helps build skeleton scripts which you can customize to your own batch needs. The process of placing your script onto a web server and creating a custom html page with graphics will also be demonstrated.

Tobias Schiebeck, International AVS Centre
An update on activities at the IAC
As in previous years the International AVS Centre will be present at this years uAUug conference. The presentation explains the objective and work of IAC and the resources IAC provides. It covers all aspects of IAC involvement from the open source repositories, module development to user and user group support. This year presentation will highlight the development projects carried out by IAC. The main focus of the development projects was on the segmentation of 3D volumes. The presentation will include a demonstration of the 3D region growing module. This region growing module will be demonstrated in conjunction with the OrthogonalViewer that allows a 4 view interactive presentation of your results. The preview to forthcoming modules will include a new segmentation editor which allows a slice by slice 2.5D segmentation of 3D volumes.