2 Introduction

This document describes the function and usage of the program map3d, a scientific visualization application developed at the Nora Eccles Harrison Cardiovascular Research and Training (CVRTI) and the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute (SCI) at the University of Utah. The original purpose of the program was to interactively view scalar fields of electric potentials from measurements and simulations in cardiac electrophysiology. Its present utility is much broader but continues to focus on viewing three-dimensional distributions of scalar values associated with an underlying geometry consisting of node points joined into surface or volume meshes.

map3d has been the topic of some papers [1,2,3,4] and a technical report [5] and we'd love it if you would reference at least one of them (perhaps [3] or [4] are the easiest ones to get copies of) as well as this manual when you publish results using it. There have been many many more papers that use map3d and the list keeps growing.[3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30]

2.1 Acknowledgments

The history of map3d goes back to 1990 and the first few hundred lines of code were the product of a few hours work by Mike Matheson, an inspired visualization specialist, now with SGI in Salt Lake City. This was my introduction to GL and C and this program became my personal sand box to play in. Along the way, Phil Ershler made valuable contributions in figuring out the magic of Formslib for some user interface controls and developing with me graphicsio, the geometry and data file library that supports map3d. Ted Dustman has recently taken up maintenance and extensions of graphicsio.

This is one in a series of ``new'' versions of map3d, the series (labeled 5.x)that marks the move from GL to OpenGL library and thus to becoming truly portable. In fact, we call the old one map3dGL now to indicate its links to SGI's original GL library. We are in the middle of a big conversion project now, moving support to OpenGL and adding lots of power as we convert functionality.

There are some people who have been instrumental in the process and deserve special mention. Chris Moulding is a graphics programmer and general software whiz who surveyed my sand box architecture, pulled together the essential walls, created new ways to make rooms, and still left lots of the sand box around so we could continue to play. From version 5.2 onward, Bryan Worthen replaced Chris and really has found the spirit of map3d and become the main driving force behind the actual work of coding and fixing. He strayed off to some other project for a while, but never lost his love for map3d; now I'm really pleased that he has returned to pick up the torch again. Since the summer of 2002, Brandon Mansfield has joined the team and teaches us all sort of useful things like how editors handle tabs.

The largest thanks must go to the users of map3d, who provided the real inspiration and identified the needs and opportunities of such a program. Among the most supportive and helpful are Bruno Taccardi, Bonnie Punske, and Bob Lux, all colleagues of mine at the CVRTI. Dana Brooks and his students from Northeastern University are also regular users who have provided many suggestions and great enthusiasm. The first user and long time collaborator and friend was Chris Johnson and this new version of map3d is possible because of the success he and I have had in creating the SCI Institute and specifically the NIH/NCRR Center for Geometric Modeling, Simulation, and Visualization in Bioelectric Field Problems.

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support that has come from the NIH, National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) the Nora Eccles Treadwell Foundation, and the University of Utah, which provides us with space and materials to create this sand box.

Rob MacLeod, February 1, 2003