Book Image

OpenGL Data Visualization Cookbook

Book Image

OpenGL Data Visualization Cookbook

Overview of this book

OpenGL is a great multi-platform, cross-language, and hardware-accelerated graphics interface for visualizing large 2D and 3D datasets. Data visualization has become increasingly challenging using conventional approaches as datasets become larger and larger, especially with the Big Data evolution. From a mobile device to a sophisticated high-performance computing cluster, OpenGL libraries provide developers with an easy-to-use interface to create stunning visuals in 3D in real time for a wide range of interactive applications. This book provides a series of easy-to-follow, hands-on tutorials to create appealing OpenGL-based visualization tools with minimal development time. We will first illustrate how to quickly set up the development environment in Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Next, we will demonstrate how to visualize data for a wide range of applications using OpenGL, starting from simple 2D datasets to increasingly complex 3D datasets with more advanced techniques. Each chapter addresses different visualization problems encountered in real life and introduces the relevant OpenGL features and libraries in a modular fashion. By the end of this book, you will be equipped with the essential skills to develop a wide range of impressive OpenGL-based applications for your unique data visualization needs, on platforms ranging from conventional computers to the latest mobile/wearable devices.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
OpenGL Data Visualization Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating an interactive environment with GLFW


In the previous two sections, we focused on the creation of 3D objects and on utilizing basic OpenGL rendering techniques with a virtual camera. Now, we are ready to incorporate user inputs, such as mouse and keyboard inputs, to enable more dynamic interactions using camera control features such as zoom and rotate. These features will be the fundamental building blocks for the upcoming applications and the code will be reused in later chapters.

Getting ready

The GLFW library provides a mechanism to handle user inputs from different environments. The event handlers are implemented as callback functions in C/C++, and, in the previous tutorials, we bypassed these options for the sake of simplicity. To get started, we first need to enable these callback functions and implement basic features to control the rendering parameters.

How to do it...

To handle keyboard inputs, we attach our own implementation of the callback functions back to the event handler...