Digital Universe Atlas

Partiview User's Guide

• Contents
• Introduction
  • What is Partiview?
  • About This Guide
  • Partiview License
  • Help and Support
  • Acknowledgments
• Installing and Testing
  • Program Requirements
  • Installing Partiview
  • Testing Partiview
• Using Partiview
  • Starting and Quitting
  • Flight Controls
  • Partiview's User Interface
  • Data Format and Input
  • Using Data Groups
  • Global View Attributes
  • Changing the Group Display
  • Drawing Objects
  • Subsetting Particle Data
  • Statistical Information
  • Importing Your Data
• Reference
  • Keyboard Controls
  • Partiview Commands
• Index

• Home
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• Partiview User's Guide
• What is Partiview?

Introduction

Introduction

About this Guide

What is Partiview?

Partiview (Particle View) is a program that visualizes and animates three dimensional particle data. With Partiview, you have the ability to navigate through 3-D data as if you're “flying.” Partiview is not limited to particle data; it can display 2-D images as well as multiple 2-D polygons that can be built into 3-D surfaces.

Partiview was created by the Virtual Director Group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. It is the child of a larger program called Virtual Director which was developed to create and edit flight paths through data sets in the CAVE virtual reality environment. These recorded flight paths are useful when making digital movies for educational programs like NOVA, IMAX films, and even the Space Shows at the Hayden Planetarium.

Partiview possesses many of the same features as Virtual Director, allowing one to view and explore data sets on your desktop or laptop. It cannot record flight paths, though it can play them. You can learn more about Partiview and how to visualize your own data in this manual. In addition, log on to Hayden Planetarium to download the latest version of Partiview and accompanying data from Hayden Planetarium's Digital Universe.