Home / Products / IRIS Explorer / 4.0 Release Notes

IRIS Explorer 4.0 - Changes and Additions

List of changes and additions in IRIS Explorer since Release 3.5

• Collaborative visualisation. This allows geographically separate IRIS Explorer sessions to share data, map construction and control of modules. Teams of co-workers can now come together to build multi-user visualisation applications. In addition, new collaborative modules can be built using the module builder. IRIS Explorer is the first commercially available visualisation system to incorporate collaborative working.
• Improved facilities for plotting graphs of y against x. Features include axis labelling, independent control of plotting style, logarithmic plots, domain specification. These features have been made available by extensions to the API; in addition, new modules which make use of this API are also part of the distribution (both as executables and source).
• Improved printing. The use of vector PostScript has been introduced in IRIS Explorer 4.0 to provide high quality output.
• The Render module has been enhanced to allow direct printing of its scene to a printer. A new print preview option has also been added. In addition, Render now supports saving its scene as VRML 2.0. Finally, the background colour of the scene has been exposed as a parameter; this allows it to be controlled from outside the module, and its value is saved when the map containing the module is saved.
• New widgets (dials, check boxes and extended scroll lists) have been added to the graphical user interface. In addition, the drawing area widget has now been implemented so that it can be used when constructing modules in the module builder; this allows users to build their own OpenGL-based modules.
• A new option has been added to the module builder to allow the use of a Windows module control wrapper, if desired. Another new option allows the construction of a collaborative module.
• The map editor interface has been enhanced to offer the option of colouring each connection according to the datatype which it is transferring between the modules. A further option allows multiple connections between pairs of modules to be displayed separately.
• Runtime licensing. A new mechanism for a two-tier (development /runtime) licensing mechanism has been introduced, which facilitates the development and distribution of applications built using IRIS Explorer.
• New modules. These include LineGraph, which produces plots of one-dimensional (y as a function of x) data, ReadECF, which reads one-dimensional data in a new format (called Explorer Chart Format), Layout, which allows you to position several pieces of geometry in the Render window, and DecimateGeom, which reduces the size of a piece of geometry by merging adjacent triangles. In addition, WriteGeom has been enhanced to offer VRML 2.0 output, Render incorporates new options for outputting picked geometry, and OrthoSlice has been extended to accept 2D lattices as well as 3D lattices.
• New demo maps (cross-section, plotting, picking, reduction, slices, layout) and example datasets.
• Performance improvements through the use of Open Inventor 2.4 for geometry data and rendering.
• Bug fixes and other system enhancements.