Something new - my Research-in-Progress pages

I thought I try something new and pulled together a couple of short snippets, some images (and a movie) to highlight a couple of developments about the research my group is doing at the VR-lab at Iowa State University. These day's anything needs a web presence and I hope that this let's me do a short (1-2 page) update every couple of month. The URL is www.hci.iastate.edu/~charding/RIP - as it's done with iWeb I would appreciate some feedback on how it looks and works

The state of iPhone

I've had my iPhone for nearly a month so here's the obligatory "so ... how is it?" report: Having had a Treo 650 for two years before the iPhone, I had to adjust to a couple of "quirks" (no notes that sync, no find in contacts of email). I've started to take pictures (outdoors) and the camera seems to be good enough for snapshots to at least satisfy the folks back home. I'm surprised how well (and fast) the phone finds and connects to public Wi-Fi. I really count on some more software becoming available in the future, I always loved the fact that Palm (and Symbian) have lots of additional software available. When Apple suddenly dropped the price, I was very lucky to be able to get a $200 (instead of the later sanctioned $100 store credit - thanks, AppleStore Adam!) - which again shows that the early bird gets the better deal :)

The only sour note is that fact that I needed to change my number despite 5+ calls to AT&T, 3 calls to Apple and a post to the AT&T iPhone forum. I don't want to get into the details but activating an iPhone for a prepaid plan (using the 999 999999 SSN trick) and then trying to port an existing AT&T account to an already activated iPhone seems impossible at least without me spending another couple of hours on the phone or getting a new SIM and re-activating. As a side note I would give the AT&T phone service better than expected marks, one gal actually called me back as promised after a couple of day, alas with no resolution. On the downside, I must have punched in my cell number 5 times during each call before even getting to a customer care rep - only to be asked again "What's your cell phone number?" (I guess it's a security thing, but come on ...) Apple's service, although also unable to help me, was super as usual - as they supposedly read all of their pot-call feedbacks, I did vent a bit on the inability of two mayor IT companies to work together on solving an issue - essentially AT&T points to something iPhone related that makes certain things impossible to do and Apple maintains that only AT&T can do anything related to the iPhone's numbers. That's very convenient for both - how about you actually talk to each other, maybe even on the phone? Why do I, who knows next to nothing about cell phone internals, have to sort fact from fiction with every new rep I get and why to I have to be the keeper of information? So far, no reply from Apple and now it's too late - I gave up my old number and migrated permanently to the iPhone. So if you need my new number - email me

Great X3D book - not just for Web Authors

I got the book X3D: Extensible 3D Graphics for Web Authors yesterday and flipped through it. My group is using a Haptics/Graphics API called H3D which is based on X3D. I did do a lot of programming with VRML 1 (aka SGI's Inventor) back in the day and always bemoaning the fact that there was no equivalent to the Inventor Mentor Book (online here) - which many of us used to get started with scenegraph programming.
Despite it's title X3D: Extensible 3D Graphics for Web Authors works well as an intro to scenegraph programming for interactive 3D graphics, i.e. even if the rendering is not done inside a browser but locally, like H3D's viewer (h3dload). H3D of course adds the Phantom and the Falcon as interaction devices and does the whole force thing as well but it could be used as local viewer as well.
But back to the book - it's well written, not too technical and also provides tons of code examples that the reader can see in action, provided a X3D web browser plugin (I've had good results with the browser plugin made by Flux although it seems to be a Windows-only thing and I'm on a Mac :( or a standalone renderer like H3D is used. I especially like that it also refers to VRML, which is great for old-timers like me, who may mainly need an "upgrade" from VRML to X3D.

Aside_rant {
I still much prefer the VRML way of describing a scene in code: its less stuff to type, it has brackets that certain people (like us Vi guys) can use to jump to the end of a block, commenting is easy (just a # and no ), etc. I know XML-aware editors can shrink and explore blocks, but still, XML just hurts to look at, at least if one grew up with C, like I did. Makes me wonder, how the VRML-style equivalent of HTML would look like - but then again I've never been much into XML stuff, so who am I to argue ...
}

The 441 page paperback book is available on Amazon here (~$65). If you use it, let me know what you think ...

Update:
rita turkowski suggested these two X3D viewers that have Mac versions:
the new InstantPlayer browser from Fraunhofer http://www.instantreality.org/downloads/ and the newly released Mac X3D Player from Octaga. http://octaga.com/
Thank Rita!

I feel like such an iPhony

I finally (and predictably) yielded to temptation and got an iPhone over the weekend (I got the full sized version from the picture:). It does surprisingly little (at least compared to my treo and its other Palm based predecessors) but it does that surprisingly well. I'm still wrestling with how to get a GTD-ish setup from combining mail, cal, contacts and notes. I could certainly list a litany of current shortcomings but I have trust in Apple (some) and the hacker community (more) to improve things over time.
I got a nice-looking (and pricey) clip-on cover with good padding (because accidents will happen). I have been enjoying the easy availability of an 4 Gb iPod that I cannot forget at home (I finally figured out how to drape the headphones around me so that they don't tangle up) and I have been using the sort-of-decent camera for some snaps for the folks back home. Come to think of it - I've used the phone part of the iPhone the least and even for web/email I've been mostly using Wi-Fi networks (given that campus, my home and most coffee shops have Wi-Fi). Using EDGE is noticeably slower but still usable (except for Google satellite maps) and it's very easy to get used to all-around internet accessibility.
However I do feel a bit iPhony about having plunked down that much money for something that get so much hype - initially I felt nearly embarrassed to whip it out to check my email while standing in line (that'll probably wear off next week :)

Sept. 13 07 update: With the price reduction I feel a bit less iPhony-ish :)

Long time no post (and maybe A New Hope :)

OK, I admit it: my fledgling first attempt at maintaining a even minimally active blog has petered out after a couple of month - probably because it's just to difficult for me to produce well-thought-out, informative posts about my research ambitions besides flood of other daily activities that are (seem) more important. But enough whining - I thought of a solution: I'll simply lower my standards and post only moderately coherent tidbits about what stuff happens around me without the restraining ambitions I originally had. After all, blogs seem to be first about having a web presence and the about content and I'll have to make due with mostly the former and maybe, if I'm lucky, some of the later. That should explain the blog title change and some of the topics I'll hopefully post about in the future - see you there (then?) !

3D scientific visualization: some examples from class

Although I'm not from a traditional 3D scientific visualization background, I decided last year to offer a intro course in 3D sci vis under the umbrella of human-computer-interaction. Besides making the students familiar with 3D data and the typical methods (isosurfaces, volume rendering, glyphs, 2.5D elevation grids, streamlines, clip planes, slabs, etc.), I've added a few sessions about human perception. For the perception part I've relied heavily on scrounging from other courses - thanks to Colin Ware, Victoria Irrante and Russ Taylor for helping me out with examples from their courses to me started!
Maybe a couple of details for those interested in the course: as I want it to be accessible to a very broad spectrum of students (from pure scientists to computer science/computer graphics people) I use Open DX (formerly known as IBM Data Explorer) as my playground. I like the network programming style as a middle ground between mainly GUI systems (like ParaView) and mainly scripting/coding systems (like VTK). I admit that the DX interface is a bit clunky (being Motif and all ...) but its data model is very powerful, it runs on Linux and Windows (via cygwin) and after using it for about a year now I think I got the hang of most of it. Still I would like to give VTK a shot one day - however my preference would be to use python as I'm more an more becoming a python guy (so maybe MayaVi is meant for me:). This year I added a part about other 3D vis systems and a couple of sessions about how to use python to massage data files (scripting) sort of a super-mini-version of "Python Scripting for Computational Science". I've put pdfs of the course slides here:

Anyhow, here are some examples of learning DX, they are all taken from student homeworks:

HW2 HW3 HW4 HW5 HW6

Wanted: Famous 1995 3D sci vis storm video (from Barker & Bushnell: After the Storm - Considerations for Information Visualization)

A student in my 3D sci vis class pointed me to this 1995 paper by Barker & Bushnell about the redesign of the 3D visualization of a storm (the original was done in 1990). The authors supposedly made a 7 min(?) movie to show how they improved the on the original visualization - but all that survived are images from this movie are screenshots. We watched the 1990 video in class and now would like to compare it to the 1995 version. The hunt for email addresses and other clues were so far, not successful; although it did lead to Info viz guru Edward Tufte, whose office was kind enough to supply the supposed snail mailing address to one of the authors (but that is so 20th century ...)
It just seems a bit strange that nobody has thought about putting this important work of mid-90's vis wizardry on the web (google video, YouTube, etc.), maybe it should be qualified as sci viz cultural heritage and put in a virtual museum?

So if anybody from the 3D vis community has any clues about the whereabouts of said video (either in digital form or on tape) - please let us know. We'll think of some kind of appropriate reward, at the very least I'll put it up on my course web site. Any hints are appreciated!

Here's the official reference for the 1995 paper:
Baker, M. P. and Bushell, C. 1995. After the Storm: Considerations for Information Visualization. IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl. 15, 3 (May. 1995), 12-15. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/38.376601