SDSC Tour/SGI Training Lab

Dr. Kris Stewart (stewart@sdsu.edu)
San Diego State University

return to Kris' Home Page

This URL is https://stewart.sdsu.edu/SDSC/VRMLdemo.html

The tour today will begin at 4pm with a walk through of the machine room at SDSC and then in the SGI Training Room at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, located on the campus of UCSD in La Jolla. Parking permits and map were distributed by Prof. Koster, with the request that students carpool over since the parking near SDSC is quite limited.

Our schedule is to meet in the lobby of SDSC at 4pm. From the parking lot (indicating on the maps distributed in class), you enter the "building" - the clunky rectangular building with the satellite dish on top - and take the elevator up one floor to the first floor. We'll check everyone in with the receptionist and then proceed to tour the machine room and then Room 275 in the West Wing of the New Annex.

I have individual logins/passwords (and user responsibility forms) to set up individual accounts on each of the SGI workstations in this room.

VRML Introduction
1. Logon to the machine
2. If you don't have an icon for "consol", then create a Unix shell by selecting "Desktop" from the Tool in the top left corner of your workstation screen and then "Unix Shell". In this shell window, start up netscape
   netscape&

3. In the Netscape browser, you want to go to the notes from the workstation on VRML which I was lucky enough to attend last month here at SDSC in this SGI lab. The notes are from Dave Nadeau's home page and I'd like folks to know that this nicely written intro to VRML will be available from the web if you want to pursue this information some other time. For today, I'd like to focus on some simple demos.

   http://www.sdsc.edu/~nadeau/

4. You can see that Dave Nadeau is a true pioneer for VRML and has made a tremendous amount of his own research available free on the Web. You should scroll down and select
   SDSC Training: Introduction to VRML 97 (June 1997)

5. Demos to explore while in the lab today

   Gravity

   This is a "lab exercise from the course" so that instructions on how the vrml is created and interfaced with the data and all the details are contained on the page. You'll want to scroll down to the very bottom and select one of the

   gravity1.wrl

   examples. wrl is the extension used for VRML files (replacing html).

   The default view is the walker

   Once you have selected the *.wrl file, the VRML viewer is launched and you'll see a whole bunch of stuff at the bottom of the screen that you will use to navigate within this three dimensional world. As you drag the mouse over each of the tool icons, you can read the directions for its use at the bottom on the screen. You might want to play around with things for quite a while.

   Change viewers (from walker to examiner)

   Hold down the right mouse buttom within the VRML page and a menu will appear - one of the selection is Viewer Type. I prefer to use the examiner viewer instead of the walker view - what do you think? Try them out and see which is simpler for you.

   Extrusion

   Note there are usually several different solutions that you can choose to examine are three dimension worlds for each of these exercises.

   Bar Plot