Pinniped Software

Game and Internet Programming
Manhattan Beach, California
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Many technologies are pushed to their limits when developing games, and these technologies can be applied to scientific endeavors as well. Pinniped Software is on the forefront of bringing high-end game technologies to the scientific desktop workstation.

The work described below was performed for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Celsius Scene-Graph Library

Originally conceived as a bridge between applications written in Open Inventor (a unix-based scene-graph library from Silicon Graphics) and the now-defunct Fahrenheit library (a joint collaboration between Microsoft and Silicon Graphics), Celsius has grown into a mature scene-graph library of its own.

Celsius runs under Windows 95/98/Me/NT4/2000/XP using OpenGL for all rendering. It is a custom code base designed to make porting from Open Inventor applications quick and easy. Here are some key features:

  • Built using industry standard OpenGL technology for full 3D hardware acceleration.
  • Get 3D applications up and running quickly and easily under Windows.
  • Port a complex existing Open Inventor application in a single afternoon!
  • Supports complex hierarchical graphical scenes with geometry re-use and timer support for real-time applications.
  • Reads Inventor 2.x and VRML 1.0 geometry/scene files directly.

Terrain Renderer

Dynamic Terrain Renderer

Implemented as a shape node in Celsius, the dynamic terrain renderer can take large height field terrain data sets, and dynamically generate a view-dependent polygonal mesh to specified error and speed tolerances, allowing interactive fly-throughs and examination.

The algorithm used is a variation on the bintree approach published by Duchaineau et al in 1997. More info...

Multi-spectral Analysis

Wrote Windows version (using MFC) of a spectral analysis program (visualizing 3D cubes of multi-spectral image data), including an asynchronous network server for reading incoming data.

Display and Processing Server Class

Implemented a multi-threaded Pushbroom network server class to receive data from a network connection instead of a file, and incorporated it into an image display and analysis program as well as the multi-spectral analysis program. The pushbroom is compatible with but not dependent on MFC.

 
Updated June, 2002.