Techniques for visualizing 3-dimensional manifolds

  • Authors:
  • Michael J. Laszlo

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Illinois at Chicago

  • Venue:
  • VIS '90 Proceedings of the 1st conference on Visualization '90
  • Year:
  • 1990

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Abstract

Computer graphics has long been concerned with representing and displaying surfaces in 3-dimensional space R3. We address the questions of representation and display in a higher dimensional setting, specifically, that of 3-manifolds immersed in R4. We describe techniques for visualizing the cross-section surfaces of a 3-manifold formed by a cutting hyperplane. The manifold is first triangulated, so that the cross-section may be computed on a per tetrahedron basis. The triangulated manifold is stored in a data structure which efficiently supports calculation of curvature. We expect the techniques, which we have implemented on the Personal IRIS, will support a highly-interactive system when implemented on a fine-grain parallel computer such as the Connection Machine.