Walkabout Mac OS

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How to create a Macintosh GeoWall

Andy Johnson (aej at evl.uic.edu)
Electronic Visualization Laboratory
University of Illinois at Chicago
Chicago, IL 60607
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Here are two photograph of our macintosh based GeoWall while it wasbeing set up in EVL. The left image shows a front-projected setup onits portable cart, while the right image shows a rear-projected setup(including the game controller sitting on the floor)

History:

We originally connected up a dual 1Ghz 'quicksilver' PowerPC G4 with512M RAM and a GeForce 4MX graphics card to two InFocus 530s mounted ona Chief Slide Projector rack sitting on a portable cart from Anthro.This gave us a portable GeoWall that we could move around theelementary school we are working in, and do linear passivefront-projection onto a Da-Lite portable screen. Total cost was around$13,000. We have also purchased a 5 foot by 6 foot Stewart rearprojection screen including a stand for $1,700 which creates a muchbetter display which is less practical to move between classrooms.

We bought the inFocus projectors, the rear projection screen and theslide projector stand from Rob Gag at projectorpoint.com as part of theGeoWall consorium. We went with the current high Macintosh with thehigh-end graphics card at the time. None of the GeoWall applciationstake advantage of a second CPU, so you could probably go with a singleCPU machine and do just fine while saving some money. We decided to gowith the inFocus 530s, which are more expensive than the inFocus 350sbut seem to get confused less often than the 350s and are brighter. Weplan to use this Geowall in classroom settings so we are not planningon adding a tracking system, but if we did add tracking to turn it intoan AGAVE, we would probably add on a PC with a PC-Bird tracker since wehave used that effectively before.

Since the GeForce4mx graphics card on the Macintosh came with oneADC port and one VGA port we needed to buy something to get the ADC(Apple Display Connector) output of the video card to talk to theprojector . We bought an ADC to VGA adapter from Dr.Bott ( $35 'VGAextractor from ADC')so we talk to both our projectors through the VGA port, but you shouldalso be able to use an ADC to DVI adapter and then talk to oneprojector through DVI and the other through VGA.

When the GeForce 4ti cards became available we did a quickevaluation. The GeForce 4ti were up to 50% fasterthan the GeForce 4mx. Pretty much any cards later than that with dualoutputs worked fine.

To give the students more buttons to play with, we investigatedseveral USB game controllers - The Macally iShock 2 was a niceplaystation-like controller. The Logitech wingman cordless rumblepadwasa nice wireless solution, though a bit heavy. Another simplercontroller option is the GyroMouse.CarvWare's GamepadCompanion seemed to work pretty well to map a controller to keypresses.

As of March 2007, pretty much any Mac Pro should work fine fora geowall. Most G5s and G4s would work fine as well. I would put atleast 1 gig of memoryinto the machine, and as good a graphics card as you can afford,preferably one with at least 128MB, and even better 256MB of texturememory. These days 256 is pretty standard so you should have noproblems.

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A decent configuration would be $2100 (less with educationaldiscount) including

  • Dual 2 GHz Dual-core Intel Xeon
  • 1 GB RAM
  • 160 GB hard drive
  • GeForce 7300 w/ 256 MB

A bigger hard drive could be good if you want to store a lot ofdatasets on the machine, and more RAM never hurts.

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Being able to dual (or triple) boot a mac is now very attractivesince you can have a mac and a windows and a linux geowall all on thesame machine. Right now bootcamp is the best solution since you can runthe graphics at full speed, but the virtualization software should beable to do this at some point.

And then the rest of the items such as

  • Panasonic PT-D3500U seem to work well - 2 x $3500 (wehave also used NEC and inFocus projectors)
  • frontprojection screen - 150 or Stewart 'Disney black' passivepolarization preserving 5' x 6' rear projection screen (with legs) -1700
  • big box of various paper and plastic glasses from here or here or formerly here - 400
  • anthroCart toroll the machine around on- 400
  • a pair of 72mm polarizing Hoya filters (for doinglinear passive stereo) - 70
  • Chief Slide Projector adjusta-set stand with verticaladjustment - 460
  • USB imitation playstation controller - 35 orGyromouse Presenter - 200

These days we also prefer doing circular polarization rather thanlinear since that allows users to tilt their head without losing thestereo effect, and makes it easier to set up the polarizers. Thisoption is slightly more expenive and there are fewer sites to get thefilters and glasses, but it gives a better result.

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SystemSoftware:

We have used OS-X 10.1.4-10.4.8. There were some significant changesin the way gcc works in 10.3, so anything compiled under 10.1 or 10.2had to be recompiled 10.3. Given the choice I'd use the latest versionavailable. The various programs also seem to run fine on the intelmacs, though they need to be recompiled. Until we get an intel tower wewon't be able to try a full intel mac-based GeoWall but the speedups onthe intel hardware have been quite promising.

If you are interested in running the various applications but do notwant to compile C/C++ code then you can follow these 'short'instructions. If you plan on creating your own applications ormodifying the existing ones then you should go onto the 'long'instructions below.

Short - Just Running the Viewers / Applications:

Here is the process to install software to run the various GeoWallviewers / applications. Some of the viewers / applications require onlyOpenGL and should run on the Macintosh immediately. Others requiresoftware to be installed. You may also want to check out the 'misc'section below ..

  1. Install Inventor. (this includes Coin3d and libsimage).Youcan get Coin3d, an open source version of SGI's OpenInventor, from ftp://ftp.coin3d.org/pub/coin/bin/macosx/. As of the time I'm writing this, the file you would get isCoin-2.4.5-gcc4.dmg for the most up-to-date machine and Coin3D. Afterinstallation you will have anInventor.framework folder in /Library/Frameworks. This includes theolder simage library that was previously separate.
  2. Install libjpeg. This is needed if you want torebuild the viewer application, or use jpeg files as textures. Theeasiest way to do this is to grab http://www.evl.uic.edu/aej/macagave/libjpeg.dmg.sit.it will install in /usr/local/jpeg. You can also get the full sourcecode from ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz andrecompile it yourself.
  3. Install GamePad Companion. If you want to useyour favourite gamepad to control the applications then you candownload GamePad Companion from http://www.carvware.com/.We have registered our copy and payed our shareware fee and it worksquite well as many of the applications have many keyboard commands andit can be a lot easier to map these keys to controlls on a gamepad. USBOverdrive is another similar product, but it doesn't support gamepadsor joysticks yet. Eventually Apple should provide a similar capabilitybut no word on when ..
  4. Improve the speed of Coin3D. You can get a tremendousspeedup in Coin3D under OS-X (2 to 10 times faster) if you adjust thedefault rendercaching values. If you use the terminal to start Coin3Dapplications on the mac you can set these two enviornment variables toforce the caching of objects with more polygons:
    setenv COIN_AUTOCACHE_LOCAL_MIN 100000
    setenv COIN_AUTOCACHE_LOCAL_MAX 1000000

Long - Developing Software Yourself:

Here is the process to install software to compile and run thevarious GeoWall viewers / applications:

  1. Install the OS-X developer tools. On new macs youcan find the installer for the developer tools inApplications/Installers/Developer Tools. You will need these tools tocompile anything on the Macintosh.
  2. Make sure that you can 'su' .. Using theTerminal, see if you can type 'su' . if not then launch NetinfoManager in Applications/Utilities. Use the menus Domain - Security -Authenticate to authenticate yourself using your password, then useDomain - Security - Enable Root User to set the root password. Choose anice safe password.
  3. Install libjpeg. This is needed if you want torebuild the viewer application, or use jpeg files as textures. Theeasiest way to do this is to grab http://www.evl.uic.edu/aej/macagave/libjpeg.dmg.sit.it will install in /usr/local/jpeg. You can also get the full sourcecode from ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz andrecompile it yourself.
  4. Install Coin3d (OpenInventor). You can getCoin3d, an open source version of SGI's OpenInventor, from ftp://ftp.coin3d.org/pub/coin/bin/macosx/. As of the time I'm writing this the file you would get isCoin-2.4.5-gcc4.dmg. After installation you will have anInventor.framework folder in /Library/Frameworks. This includes theolder simage library that was previously separate.
  5. Install GamePad Companion. If you want to useyour favourite gamepad to control the applications then you candownload GamePad Companion from http://www.carvware.com/.We have registered our copy and it works quite well as many of theapplications have many keyboard commands and it can be a lot easier tomap these keys to controlls on a gamepad. USB Overdrive is anothersimilar product, but it doesn't support gamepads or joysticks yet.
  6. Install fltk. If you want to recompile the frontend to walkabout then you will need fltk. The source code for fltk(1.1.X) can be obtained through http://www.fltk.org- it is a 1.2 MB download. Just type ./configure and make and it shouldcompile fine within its own directories.

Misc - other useful pieces of software

  • you may want to set DockHiding to be on to get morescreen real estate
  • GraphicConverterworks quite well for showing stereo slideshows on the mac. The firsttime you view a slideshow you will need to stretch the window to coverboth screens but after that Graphic Converter will remember.
  • Matlab works fine in stereo using the stereoview 3.0modification
  • VMD, PyMol and CrystalMaker can be used to viewmolecules etc. in stereo on the mac.
  • partiviewworks for looking at astronomical things on the mac.
  • I have been using apple scripts to launch theapplications from the desktop rather than using the terminal. Forexample I made an application out of the following script and gave it acute icon to launch the stereo pair viewer with the solar pair (thanksto John Muccigrosso for the script tip):
    on run
    do shell script 'cd ~/geowall/viewer-0.8.0
    ./viewer -i testpairs/pair0611b-l.ppm testpairs/pair0611b-r.ppm'
    end run
    Here is a linkto another applescript which you can download and place in theimmersaview folder. You can compile it using the Script Editor inApplications/Applescript to make a double-clickable application. Itwill allow you to launch immersaview and choose which model to view.
  • you may also want to grab ShellShell (you can find iton http://www.versiontracker.comand it may still be here)Its pretty useful for giving a pretty interface to unix commands so youcan easily set the input files for a bunch of the applications likeimmersaview and the stereo pair viewer below. At the end of thisparagraph you will find the scripts that I use in ShellShell for thestereo slide viewer and immersaview. You will need to download these todisc and then place these into the ShellShell Macros folder that comeswith ShellShell and then use a text editor to alter the text files topoint to the location where you store your applications. I put eachGeoWall application directory inside a folder called GEOWALL. viewer.txtand immersaview.txt.
  • you will want to use the displays System PreferencesPane to arrange the two projectors - I have the main screen (coming outof the ADC connector on the GeForce4mx ) on the left and the secondscreen (coming out of the VGA connector on the GeForce4mx) on theright. Both screens should be set to 1024 x 768, millions of colors asthat is the default GeoWall size right now.

GeoWallSoftware:

Most of the software that drives the GeoWall under Linux will drivethe wall under OS-X. Things that do not work include SGI Performer andthe CAVE library, so you can't use models that end in .pfb, but .ivfiles work fine.

The following common GeoWall applications work on the Mac under OS-X.

Russ Burdick's stereo pair viewer 0.8.0should run as-ishttp://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~wburdick/geowall/viewer.html
Immersaview

0.4

requires Inventor / Coin3d

(obtained above)

http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/agave/immersaview/
Walkabout 1.3.2requires Inventor / Coin3d

(obtained above)

http://www.evl.uic.edu/aej/macagave/walkabout.html

Various Shareware/commercial packages work in stereo as well on the Macunder OS-X:
Graphic Converter (for stereo slideshows) -http://www.graphicconverter.net/
Partiview -http://haydenplanetarium.org/universe/partiview/
VMD - http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/
CrystalMaker - http://www.crystalmaker.com/
PyMol - http://pymol.sourceforge.net/
Matlab (with the StereoView modification) -http://www.mathworks.com/http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/loadFile.do?objectId=4715&objectType=FILE
and Holodraw (http://www.holodraw.org/) can be useful in convertingdata into VRML for viewing in 3D on the GeoWall

Here are some other applciations we have been using on the mac - Ican provide links if anyone is interested ..

pairviewer (simple OpenInventor stereo pair image viewer) forrgb images - now replaced by viewerrequires the Inventor.framework
modelViewer (simple OpenInventor inventor model viewer) for.iv models - now replaced by Immersaviewrequires the Inventor.framework
fishtank (OpenInventor application used in our ElementarySchool science work)requires the Inventor.framework
the Field (OpenInventor application used in our ElementarySchool science work)requires the Inventor.framework
Round Earth (OpenInventor application used in our ElementarySchool science work)requires the Inventor.framework
battalion (OpenGL game)should run as-is

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions please let meknow - aej at evl.uic.edu

last update March 9, 2007

3/9/07 - updated the current 'buyable' mac configuration

7/1/06 - added in some other software that is compatible on themac side

5/8/05 - general freshing up version numbers and configurations

3/15/04 - updates some of the issues related to coin, and updatedthe mac pricing

7/11/03 - updated the mac pricing

4/15/03 - added in the 2 environment variable settings whichdramatically improve the speed of Coin3D applications under OS-X

12/30/02 - updated inventor.dmg and viewer.dmg for OS-X 10.2.3

9/18/02 - added some short notes re OS-X 10.2

7/30/02 - added walkabout to the software list

Connection (michs) mac os. 7/22/02 - viewer on the mac now upgraded to 0.7.3

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