HEV VR integration library

HEV is a VR integration library developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). While it is possible to develop individual visualization applications from HEV, HEV takes the approach of having a single primary application (irisfly) that can be expanded using dynamically loadable options, along with using a control scheme that uses independent GUI tools that send commands to the application through a named pipe.

HEV was primarily written by John Kelso, a member of the NIST HPCVG (High Performance Computing and Visualization Group), and builds on the DTK (Diverse ToolKit) from Virginia Tech.

There are many visualization applications that have been created using the extendable "irisfly" scheme.

Running HEV

There are a number of steps to configure the shell environment before running HEV. Primarily there will be a bash configuration script that will handle the details.

Preparinging the Environment

% cd .../hev
% source .bashhev
% hevhere
Setting up the IRIS environment
[...]
% echo $HEVROOT
/home/<user>/Apps/hev  # or whatever

In another shell you can run several commands that interact with the DTK tracking:

% dtk-caveDeviceSimulator

To find other available (of a myriad of) tools, use the "findAnts" tool:

% hev-findAnts

Running irisfly with a model file

The basic irisfly application can take arguments to load a model file.

% man irisfly
% irisfly --ex tape.osg
% irisfly -s --ex tape.osg    # To run in simulator mode only

Running irisfly with an existing visualization (demo)

There are many visualizations that have been created for the HEV environment. These can be found in the directories baseDemos and extendedDemos.

irisfly interactive keyboard commands

There are several active keys available when running irisfly:

j -- toggle jump mode
- h -- toggle head
C -- Cave simulator
c -- bounding boxes
keypad arrows -- rotate when in (or not in?) jump mode
5 -- reset view rotation

Building HEV

HEV Dependencies

HEV depends on a handful of libraries to compile the final applications. The HEV build-tree contains compatible versions of many of these libraries:

OpenSceneGraph
dtk
FLTK
coin
(perhaps others)

Installing HEV

Configuring HEV

Data from a NOTES file by John Hagedorn:

Origin is four feet out (in X, Y, & Z) from corner where screens meet
(So HEV origin is four feet above ART origin.)
X to the right (while facing front screen)
Y is toward the front screen
(Y completes the right handed coord system.)
Z up
Unit is 4ft
(Because the first NIST CAVE was 8x8' and the coordinate system was normalized to -1.0 to +1.0)

Terminology

HEV -- High End Visualization
IDEA -- IRIS Development Environment for Applications
IRIS -- Interpreted Runtime Immersive Scenegraph

HEV

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