caveMathematica

This summer, I am the Student Principal Investigator for the caveMathematica Group. We will be debugging and liberating the program caveMathematica.exe so that it will work in multiple environments and, more specifically, in the Phleet environments in the CAVE/CUBE. After that we will continue demo development and possibly use the mathlink connection inherent in its operation to more fully utiliize CUDA enabled GPU's.

caveMathematica was originally developed over the past two years by Mimi Tsuruga of Hunter College and Ulisses Pimentel of Wolfram Research. It is a program which creates a link between Mathematic 6.0 and OpenGL/SZG. The program uses the mathLink protocol packaged with Mathematica to talk over TCP/IP. Because of this we can compute all the surface data on a more powerful computer that is outside of the SZG network, decreasing the amount of time it take our images to display.

To further increase the usefulness of the program, one of the projects goals this summer is to alllow for dynamically allocated buffers. The buffers are static now and this means that only one surface can be displayed at a time. In the future we would like to have many surfaces displaying at once to compare them. We will also add the functionality to draw lines. The basic shape that we use now is triangles.

In the CAVE now from this summer are examples of Nil geometry written by Lisa Hickok and an example of the TriTorus written by Katie Poon. We hope to see many more examples make their way into the CAVE with this method. Also visualized is the Knot RollerCoaster by Mimi and Ulisses.