geomview for NeXT

Sorry about the delay in answering: I'm been somewhat swamped trying
to get a number of things ready before the MSRI conference. Will you
be there?

I was a undergrad in the computer science department at Stanford. I
actually met you a few years ago at some political conference, can't
remember what it was called.  By the way, can you talk Marc Levoy (the
graphics prof in the CS dept) into giving you an account at his SGI
lab? I think he now has a number of them in CIS.

Our current Mathematica packages do not use MathLink: they invoke a
short C program that uses Unix pipes to hook up to geomview. (I'm not
sure if you're interested, but by combining this with our
OOGL->Renderman converter (which we haven't put out in ftp yet), you
can get a command line Mathematica->Renderman pipeline instead of
having to go through geomview to get a Renderman snapshot). From the
README file:

OOGL.m is a Mathematica package for converting Mathematica graphics
objects to OOGL format, which is the data format understood by
Geomview, the Geometry Center's 3D viewer.  Graphics objects may be
written to disk files or to a running Geomview program.
Geomview.m makes Geomview the default style for viewing 3D graphics.


There is some interest here in completely porting some or all of OOGL
into Objective-C. I'm not sure if we're considering writing wrappers
first, or just waiting until we do a complete port. We haven't even
begun work on this yet, since we first want to get the non-Next
runtime libraries working.  So I would *not* hold my breath waiting
for this if I were you.

We currently have one person (Dennis Roseman) at the University of
Iowa alpha testing the Next version. It's still very bug-ridden, but
if you really want to start working with it we could pack up the most
recent version for you. Since you don't have an account here we could
just put it in an obscure place in our ftp directory (stuff as opposed
to pub), then delete it after you've grabbed it. I'm CCing this
message to Scott Wisdom, who's working on the Next port and would be
doing the packing up.  What kind of hardware and software do you have
now? (It requires NextStep 3.0.)

Can you go into a little more detail about this "special evolution
code" you'd be using it with?

Tamara