To get Partiview to display your data, the data has to be wrapped in some ascii (plain text) files. Here's where you can find details of the wrappers.

Beginners : the Partiview User Guide by Brian Abbott.

Intermediate : the Partiview Reference Manual (HTML) (or PDF) by Peter Teuben and Stuart Levy; or Peter Teuben's collection of partiview and related reference material.

Other miscellaneous documentation from Cosmus.

Some past emails from Stuart about commands for including Maya OBJ files, the warp command to allow the three spatial coordinates to be arbitrary weighted combinations of as many dimensions as you specify (and change the weights without having to restart partiview), compiling partiview with static libraries,...

Also have a look at the archives of the mailing lists for partiview and the Digital Universe (once the archives exist, anyway...)

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There are many things one can do with a fast 3d+time viewer. Here are some examples that have free downloads and documentation.

Astronomy

Planet Stuff

Overlay a rectangular map of a world on a simple sphere and - voila! - you have a planet.

Planets for Partiview by Selden Ball. Earth (with clouds), Mars, and Jupiter. Earth Views by Cosmus. With simple button clicks you can easily switch between different views of earth on a single globe - night vs day, 20 000 years ago vs today. Planetary Scales by Cosmus. Russian dolls model of Sol and its (first) nine planets, to scale.

Documentation:

How to make a planet: short version by Cosmus, long (and original) version by Selden Ball.

Global Networks

PlanetLab Overlays by Dinoj Surendran and Matei Ripeanu (UChicago). Using a 3d viewer allows the height of a link to represent information - in this case bandwidth.

Documentation:

Dealing with latitude and longitude, by Cosmus

Astrophysics

AIRES Simulations by Cosmus. AIRES is a standard package used by physicists to produce the positions and times of particles in the air shower created when a cosmic ray/particle hits the atmosphere. Partiview is used to visualize its output. The resulting shower models, and short movies made with them, are used by for outreach and presentations by members of the Pierre Auger and VERITAS projects.

Machine Learning

Partiview makes textured 3d scatterplots usable. Three-dimensional scatterplots are normally clunky to use, but not with partiview. And having textured glyphs is really cool - sometimes even useful - for data with a natural visual representation. These, and other features, turn out to be very useful for testing the output of machine learning algorithms.

Clustering patterns. How well can a computer recognize handwritten digits written by humans? Partiview views the output of one particular algorithm on five thousand different digits. A similar demo was used by a keynote speaker (Dimitris Achlioptas of Microsoft) at the ECML/KDD 2004 conference.

Documentation:

NIPS 2004 demo abstract by Dinoj Surendran & Stuart Levy. The lowdown on what features of partiview are useful for a machine learning audience.

Matlab Interface to produce partiview format files given data matrices. Matlab is a standard working environment for researchers in machine learning, speech recognition, and other fields.

Remote Collaboration

Partiview was used with Virtual Director by groups in Illinois and New York to meet online in a virtual environment and simultaneously design the space show "The Search for Life: Are We Alone?" for Hayden Planetarium.

SDSC and NCSA create spectacular animation for Hayden Planetarium's new show, SDSC Press Release, 7 March 2002.

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Binaries for partiview for Windows, Linux, Irix, and OS X can be downloaded from the Digital Universe site - click on "Download" for "Partiview (version 0.7.06) 15 Dec 2003".

However, the above binaries do not have features added to Partiview since 2004. These include the focalpoint command for stereo viewing (required for geowalls), chromadepth stereo, and the warp commands for time-dependent particle positions, N-D-to-3-D projection, or epicyclic galaxy orbits. The binaries below do have these features. If they do not work on your computer, however, you'll have to compile from source.

Windows (Dec 2013) (zipped, 1.5MB).

(older) Mac OS X (10.5), Intel x86, .tar.gz (November 2010) (zipped, 0.4Mb).

Mac OS X (10.7-10.12), Intel x86_64, .tar.gz (Aug 2017) (tar.gz, 1.2Mb).

(older) Linux Intel x86 (November 2010) (zipped, 0.6Mb)

Linux Intel x86-64, RedHat 5 (Dec 2013) (tar.gz, 0.9Mb)

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Partiview includes a data-handling and display library that can be embedded in other systems such as Virtual Director.

To get the source code, check out the CVS version - literally - with the following command:

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.astro.umd.edu:/home/cvsroot -z1 checkout partiview

To compile Partiview you'll also need FLTK 1.1.x, from fltk.org.

Here's an example session for compiling partiview on linux, on a system where you aren't root, and where you have to install FLTK yourself. We start with assuming that you're in your home directory /home/elmo

cd /home/elmo Type the cvs command above. This creates the directory /home/elmo/partiview Download some version of the fltk.1.1.x source code from fltk.org. Untar/zip/bz it into a new directory, say /home/elmo/fltk.1.1 cd /home/elmo/fltk.1.1 ./configure make cd /home/elmo/partiview/src ./configure --with-fltk=/home/elmo/fltk.1.1 make This should result in an eponymous partiview binary in the /home/elmo/partiview/src directory that you can move to wherever you want.

For more details, such as how to compile Partiview on Windows, see the Reference Guide.

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Partiview supports several stereo features, including red-cyan, chromadepth, and side-by-side.

The side-by-side feature allows Partiview to be used on low-cost dual-projector polarization-based stereo systems such as the GeoWall. Documentation on that can be found here.

Partiview does not work on planetarium domes. However, some major makers of digital domes - such as Sky Skan, Evans & Sutherland - have written beta-stage plugins that convert files in Partiview format to the native format of their dome projector software.

Brian Abbott and Ryan Wyatt treated attendees of the 10th Great Lakes Planetarium Conference to a tour of their Partiview-based Digital Universe on a Sky Skan dome in October 2004 at the Detroit Science Museum.

Therefore, if you're an astronomer and want your work to be usable on a digital dome, publishing it in Partiview format is a good start.

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"Interactive 3-D visualization of particle systems with Partiview" by Stuart Levy, 2001. Appeared in the Proceedings (Vol 208) of the International Astronomical Union Symposium on "Astrophysical Supercomputing Using Particles".

Immersive 4D Interactive Visualization of Large-Scale Simulations by Peter Teuben, Piet Hut, Stuart Levy, Jun Makino, Steve McMillan, Simon Portegies Zwart, Mike Shara, Carter Emmart. 2001. Arxiv preprint astro-ph/0101334. Also in ASP Conf. Ser., Vol. 238, Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems X, ed. F.R. Harnden, Jr., F.A. Primini, & H.E.Payne (San Francisco: ASP) p 499.

Visualizing High-dimensional datasets with Partiview by Dinoj Surendran and Stuart Levy, 2004. Poster Proceedings of Information Visualization 2004.

Visualising and Analysing Massive Astronomical Datasets with PartiView, Charles Liu (AMNH). A short powerpoint presentation at a Virtual Observatory conference in 2002.

More partiview-related references can be found with Google Scholar.

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Copyright 2002-2003 NCSA, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, All rights reserved. Developed by: Stuart Levy, NCSA Virtual Director Group University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign http://virdir.ncsa.illinois.edu/ Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal with the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimers. * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimers in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. * Neither the names of NCSA, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this Software without specific prior written permission. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE CONTRIBUTORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS WITH THE SOFTWARE.

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Subscribe to partiview Email: Browse Archives at groups-beta.google.com

Partiview is an acceptable entry format for the NSF's Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge - something that is not at all obvious from their rulebook. This is because Partiview files can be run off a CD in Windows without requiring anything to be copied onto the machine it runs on.

Partiview can be called from Powerpoint by embedding it in an object.

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Here are several members of the partiview community mentioned on this page:

At Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History:

John Kielkopf, Department of Physics, University of Louisville

Peter Teuben at the Astronomy Department at the University of Maryland.

Steve McMillan of the Physics Department at Drexel University.

Cosmus is an informal group of individuals from Adler Planetarium & Science Museum, and the University of Chicago.

Related Software:

Other Partiview sites:

Other projects from NCSA's Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL) are described here.

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Send brickbats for page design to DS. Dec '04