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Visualization tools

Advanced Visual Systems (AVS)
    International AVS Centre clearinghouse for visualization software, with over 900 public domain modules.

UM supercomputer for scientific visualization & graphics
    Extensive descriptions and links to commercial and public software for 3-dimensionally plotting, contouring, volume rendering, image processing, animation and videos, fluid visualization, and related topics.

Following are a few of the many toolboxes specializing in 3-dimensional rendering and visualization:

SCIRun & BioPSE
    Integrated porblem solving environments emphasizing visualization of continuous 3-D images and movies.  Written in Tcl with interfaces to Fortran, C++, Matlab, C and IDL.  From the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at University of Utah.

Visual3
    Interactive graphics environment for visualization of 3D, structured or unstructured data. Written in Fortran and C for OpenGL platforms. By G. Haimes (MIT).

VolPack & related libraries
    Software libraries for 3-D continuous data: high-quality volume rendering, aligning and merging datasets, filling data gaps, efficient rotation, and more.   Written in Tcl & OpenGL.  From Stanford Computer Graphics Lab.

GGobi
    An update of the well-regarded XGobi program for interactively exploring multivariate point-like data including brushing, editing, rotation, grand tour and projection pursiut.

ImageMagick
    Flexible software suite for the creation, modification and display of bitmap images in many formats.  Runs interactively or interfaces with Perl, C/C++, Python, Tcl, Java and more. From ImageMagick Studio LLC.

Visualization Toolkit (vtk)
    Comprehensive visualization system for 3-dimensional graphics, image and volume processing, many color and texture options, scalar to tensor displays, filtering and qmodeling, handles large datasets. Extensible C++ code with Tcl or Java wrapper.  From Kitware Inc.

XmdvTool
    Software package for the interactive visual exploraton of multivariate datasets including scatterplots, star glyphs, parallel coordinates, and dimenensional stacking with N-dimensional brushing. Designed for UNIX platforms at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Xnavigation
    Interactive program for navigating through multivariate datasets using smooth low-dimensional local structures. By S. Oue of Carnegie Mellon University and distributed by Statlib.

CViz
    A Java-based visualization tool for analyzing large and complex high-dimensionality datasets. By IBM.

Information Visualization & Exploration (IVEE)
    Advanced package for data visualization, specializing on dynamic query techniques (zooming, rangesliders, alphasliders & toggles) and cluster visualization. From Chalmers University; more recent commercial versions are available at Spotfire AB.

DATAPLOT
    Interactive 2-D and 3-D plotting package (histograms, box plots, time series, diagrams) with fitting (non-linear, polynomial, spline) and statistics (summary, distribution fuctions, ANOVA, smoothing). From the National Institute of Standards & Technology.

The following are public domain scientific graphics and plotting programs:

PGPLOT
    Subroutine library for producing scientific graphs, written in Fortran and callable by many languages.  By T. J. Pearson (Astronomy, Caltech).

Gnuplot
    Interactive data and function plotting utility in 2D and 3D.