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

Setting up the GLEW, GLM, SOIL, and OpenCV libraries in Windows


In this section, we will provide step-by-step instructions to set up several popular libraries that will be used extensively in this chapter (and in subsequent chapters), including the GLEW, GLM, SOIL, and OpenCV libraries:

  • The GLEW library is an open-source OpenGL extension library.

  • The GLM library is a header-only C++ library that provides an easy-to-use set of common mathematical operations. It is built on the GLSL specifications and as it is a header-only library, it does not require tedious compilation steps.

  • The SOIL library is a simple C library that is used to load images in a variety of common formats (such as BMP, PNG, JPG, TGA, TIFF, and HDR) in OpenGL textures.

  • The OpenCV library is a very powerful open source computer vision library that we will use to simplify image and video processing in this chapter.

Getting ready

We will first need to download the prerequisite libraries from the following websites:

  • GLEW (glew-1.10...