Guidance Please! 3D Visualization of real-time data

Hello everyone.

Please excuse the possible simplicity and vagueness of my question, as I have no or at most very little experience in this field.

I’ve created a LabView (National Instruments) program that processes data in real-time from my hardware/instruments. This data is then manipulated to get a series of normal vectors and other dimensions.

So say I have a file which contains a series of points or vectors that are constantly updated (more than once per second). Indeed these points will dictate the shape of a cylindrical object with a known diameter. As the points change, the shape of the cylinder will change (ie. bend).

If I create a model of this “cylinder” in say 3dsMax or any other program, how do I go about allowing these coordinates to dictate its shape in a “real-time”/low latency virtual environment?

At the moment, I have a simple graph in LabView contained within a loop that plots a curve of points that simulates my cylinder. Obviously, however, this is subpar because the visual quality is poor, and I would like to customize the features of my model.

Thank you for any help!

-Alex

If I create a model of this “cylinder” in say 3dsMax or any other program, how do I go about allowing these coordinates to dictate its shape in a “real-time”/low latency virtual environment?

Let me see if i understood… you have all the points of the model… and those points change more than 1x per second… right? And you wanna render this model in the screen and see, in real time, the model changing when the points information change… is that right?

Yes, that is correct.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to do this?

This must be known by someone. I’ve seen others do this (somehow) with SensAble technology like Phantom.

Come to think of it, essentially my system is only slightly different from any video game controller. A video game controller sends a signal to the processor, and the processor controls the graphics. In my case, it’s not different: my data is a representation of a physical system and I want that data to control my 3d graphics.

Unfortunately I’m not familiar with labview, but in theory, I assume it’s an application for which you cannot modify the source. This would mean that the application would need to have some existing feature or method of sending data in real-time via some sort of IPC in a synchronized fashion to another process which can do the rendering of the data. All this assumes the application doesn’t have a renderer of it’s own.

Pretty much it boils down to the fact, that any solution to this, would be specific to labview, and not really related to OpenGL ES. At least thats how I see it, wish I could be of more help.

LabView is merely a programming language, much like C or Visual Basic. It simply uses a different format for coding. Unfortunately it does not have a renderer of its own, which is what I’m looking for.

I can send the data out in real-time to a data file. I need this data read and rendered. Any more suggestions?

Apprently, there’s an unofficially supported 3d renderer that uses Mesa for labView… perhaps that will do the trick?

For more details:

http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/4411

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