IRIS Explorer 3.5 for Intel and Alpha NT platforms

The latest version of IRIS Explorer, the popular visualisation toolkit and application builder from NAG, is Release 3.5. This features a wealth of new functionality, including new methods for displaying and analysing data on irregular grids, improved support for non-vertex data and the addition of solid contouring in 2D and 3D. Also featured are support of a new plain ASCII format for data input and performance enhancements through the use of Open Inventor 2.1 for geometry data and rendering. The reaction of users to IRIS Explorer 3.5 since its appearance on Silicon Graphics platforms has been very enthusiastic, and NAG is currently working on complementing this release by making it available on other platforms.

A scene from IRIS Explorer 3.5 running under Windows NT 4.0 on a DEC AlphaStation 255. Some of the new features of Release 3.5 are highlighted in this test map including: displacement maps of pyramid data and line and solid contouring of pyramid faces. The data set is from a 2D unsteady simulation of fluid flow past a rotating cylinder.

The next release of 3.5 will be for PCs running Windows NT. IRIS Explorer 3.0 was released for Intel architectures last year to great acclaim, and its functionality has been further enhanced by Release 3.1, which featured a new module builder, group editor and the plain ASCII file formats for data input.

Building on this momentum, IRIS Explorer 3.5 for NT will bring all of its features - new modules and maps, system enhancements and improved performance - to the PC desktop. Other new modules will be added for 3.5 under NT, including the image processing module suite built on top of ImageVision, the state-of-the-art object-oriented image processing library originally developed by Silicon Graphics. Finally, the release will contain enhanced on-line documentation for the PC platform.

This image shows some of the advanced pyramid rendering features in IRIS Explorer 3.5. ShrinkPyr has been used to reduce the size of individual cells in a pyramid, and contour lines have been added using ContourPyr. Also visible in the bottom left hand corner is the new Module Builder, which has been updated for the Windows NT release of IRIS Explorer, which is running here on a DEC AlphaStation.

A significant feature of IRIS Explorer 3.5 is that it will be the first version to appear on DEC Alpha PCs. This has proved to be a popular platform - particularly in the Far East - and NAG is pleased to be able to complement the existing Intel version and extend the range of its supported platforms with the addition of the DEC Alpha PC to its portfolio of IRIS Explorer versions. Both new ports of IRIS Explorer 3.5 - for Intel NT and DEC Alpha NT - will be released at the same time.

NAG will shortly be announcing the release of IRIS Explorer 3.5 for NT. In the meantine, keep an eye on the Web page of the IRIS Explorer Center at http://www.nag.co.uk/Welcome_IEC.html (External) for further information and up-to-date announcements about IRIS Explorer.