On Sunday, October 18, I attended a full day tutorial on Visualization Toolkits.
Instructors:
Kenneth M. Martin, Lisa Sobierajski Avila, William E. Lorensen, James V. Miller, William J. Schroeder
Course Description from Conference Program
In this tutorial we will discuss fundamental issues regarding the design, implementation, and application of 3D graphics and visualization systems. We will describe and contrast some current systems such as Open Inventor, Java3D, Data Explorer and the Visualization Toolkit. We will examine in more detail the implementation of the Visualization Toolkit. This will be used to illustrate important design issues such as graphics portability, interpreted versus compiled languages, multiple versus single inheritance, data flow models, and user interaction methods. In the remainder of this tutorial we will focus on applying visualization techniques and toolkits to solve problems from a selection of application domains.
The instructors for this tutorial were all on the development team for the Visualization Toolkit (vtk). This significantly colored their contrasting of the approaches. However, I found it to be quite an interesting tutorial. Vtk does have a lot in its favor, not the least of which is a full Object Oriented approach. Bill Lorensen, the “primary investigator” for vtk, was one of the co-authors of the OMT method with James Rumbaugh (Object-Oriented Modeling and Design, 1991).