[vtkusers] VISAN

[Sander Niemeijer]

Dear VTK users,

At our company we have been working on a free open source cross 
platform visualization and analysis application called VISAN. The BEAT 
project in which this application was developed was funded by the 
European Space Agency and is targeted at scientists that want to access 
and visualize data coming from atmospheric monitoring instruments that 
fly on the ENVISAT satellite <http://envisat.esa.int/>. Only recently 
we provided a first release of the VISAN application and you can 
download this application freely from our website 
(<http://www.science-and-technology.nl/beat/>) (registration is 
optional).

The VISAN application was build using several freely available open 
source toolkits. We used a combination of wxPython (2.4.2.4), Python 
(2.3.3), Numarray (0.9), and of course VTK (4.4.2).

In order to get the functionality we wanted we made two powerful 
extensions to VTK:

The first extension is a complete overhaul of the vtkXYPlotActor class. 
The mayor change is the addition of a vtkInteractorStyleXYPlot class 
that allows you to interact with your X/Y plot (you can zoom and pan 
the data in your plot). But we also added logarithmic axis, better 
automatic tick position calculation, and a lot more.

The second extension is a vtkProj2DFilter class. This class uses the 
PROJ library to map latitude/longitude coordinates to a series of 
different 2D projections or a 3D projection. This class has the ability 
to cut lines and polygons if they cross the boundaries of your map and 
can also interpolate line segments in order to get proper curves on 
your 2D map.

In addition we have also added several VTK support classes. For example 
a vtkGSHHSReader class for ingesting GSHHS data 
<http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/wessel/gshhs/gshhs.html>.

Furthermore, I recently noticed a lot of questions on the mailing list 
regarding the combination of Python, VTK, and a GUI toolkit. For those 
users that would like to get this working, the source distribution of 
VISAN may be a good starting point. We have added an almost automatic 
build system for Linux and Mac OS X and step by step build instructions 
for Windows (using VC++ 6.0).

Best regards,
Sander Niemeijer
Science [&] Technology
The Netherlands