General-purpose 3D animation with VITASCOPE

This paper presents VITASCOPE, a general-purpose, user-extensible 3D visualization system for animating processes that are modeled using discrete-event simulation tools. VITASCOPE is an ASCII stream driven 3D animation tool that runs readily on a wide variety of hardware platforms ranging from commonly used desktops and laptops to high-end, room-sized, immersive virtual environments such as the CAVE. VITASCOPE parses and interprets an ASCII stream, and imports and manipulates existing 3D CAD models of the simulated system entities to visually depict modeled processes. The used CAD models may be created in any CAD modeling package capable of exporting models in the VRML format. VITASCOPE's architecture is open and loosely-coupled, thus allowing it to serve as a post-processed or concurrent 3D visualization engine for simulation models created in a wide variety of languages and tools. VITASCOPE is built on the industry standard OpenGL graphics library and runs on Windows and Irix based workstations.