Present: Tom Trippe, Tim McMahon, Amber Boehnlein, Nobu Oshima, Sharon Hagopian, Saul Youssef (minutes).
Tim McMahon showed us two projects that he has been working on. The first is a Java based "Virtual D0" showing the status of the detector, data taking, who's on shift, chat areas, status of the Tevatron etc. This has a great deal of potential for being useful for monitoring the experiment and also can give D0 a "web presence" for PR purposes during the run (e.g. like NASA has). Tim also has a VRML representation of the D0 control room and pieces of the detector showing what is possible with VRML. By using photos made into textures and pasted onto polygons, he can give quite a realistic feel to the scene as well as displaying useful information. We discussed the idea of using this texture technique to make a D0 "photo catalogue" giving a nicely organized VRML and/or plain html uniform view of digital photos taken to help document the hardware construction and installation. It's easy to imagine extending this, for example, we could have comparable images documenting the Monte Carlo, a room with SUSY candidate event displays, a room with collaboration photos etc. Pointers to Tim's work can be found on the graphics page.
Tom Trippe gave an amusing talk showing what can happen when you're dealing with 1/2 dozen coordinate systems at once. In the end, though, he has a detailed display of the SMT taken from the geometry data base. After getting all the minus signs right and overcoming a problem in CLHEP, he showed us that he is correctly representing fine details fo the SMT geometry. He also explained his plans for representing "pulls" showing displacements of the detectors from their true positions as determined by tracks. Some question was raised about the speed of this display, but Tom set it up on d0sgifsu1 and it's really extremely zippy.
Nobu showed what he is doing with SMT's and unpacking SMT chunks. This is something of a moving target, but the main problems seem to be solved. Nobu also showed his evaluations of the WIRED Java based system for SMT display showing a detailed view of the SMT extracted from the GEANT representation. Nobu plans to get together with Tom and Harrison when he returns to get a combined display going that can be of immediate use to the SMT algorithm people.
Amber presented her work on a OIV based framework for our event displays. This is aimed at scene construction and i/o classes that will make things easy for us and be compatible with future developments in HepVis. This seems like a great idea since Amber has the most experience of any of us with these issues. A little concern was expressed that we don't end up waiting for a new framework when our main goal is to provide for immediate urgent needs. We'll have to see what can be put together in the next few weeks. Pointers to Amber's slides can be found on the graphics page.
Although Joe Boudreau wasn't able to make this meeting, he contacted me afterwords and is interested in helping. He's going to be around during the week starting July 13.
I forgot to mention this during the meeting, but there has been some progress on the hardware front. OIV and the KAI compiler now work on d0sgifsu1 and we have a 9G local disk (/exports/graphics1) at our disposal. Members of the graphics group should feel free to use this machine.