From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2007 08:55:17 +0000 From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" Message-ID: References: <20070627183518.GD28917@kris.home>, <20070627190951.73A8B5B3B@mail.bitblocks.com> Subject: Re: [9fans] Colors and other fun Topicbox-Message-UUID: 8ee5a466-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 "Bakul Shah" wrote in message news:20070627190951.73A8B5B3B@mail.bitblocks.com... > I am not sure what I mean :-) Guess some sort of 3D UI. A > way to deal with 3d objects. ... You need to distinguish between a genuine 3D display, which is extremely rare, a stereoscopic display, which is not as rare (I have played Tomb Raider on a PC in stereo), and a 3D *model* rendered in 2D, which is pretty common these days. 3D rendering is computationally intensive, and in modern times it is usually done by sending the model to a so-called 3D graphics card along with lighting and viewing parameters; updating just the viewing parameters is sufficient to view a static model from all aspects. For 3D games a lot of compromises are made in order to be able to supply new model information at a good frame rate as the modeled objects move in real time. You might look into free 3D rendering software such as the POV ray-tracer or the BRL-CAD package (on SourceForge I believe), which I contributed to in its early days. These provide modeling and viewing tools, and in the case of BRL-CAD there are programming library facilities for interrogating the model geometry, for applications like ballistic vulnerability studies. *Maybe* these could be ported to Plan 9; I suspect APE would be helpful. If there is an X-Windows server for Plan 9 it might not be too hard.