Hypercube viewer

Introduction

Viewing and interacting with multi-dimensional volumes is necessary when working with 3-D data. SEP wrote its first movie program 28 years ago and has continually expanded on this initial idea (Ottolini, 1983,1988; Sword, 1981; Claerbout, 1981; Ottolini, 1982,1990). These movie programs have progressed from simply showing a series of frames to allowing greater and greater levels of interactivity.

Interactivity can take several forms. Numerous attempts have been made at SEP to take human input to geophysical algorithms.Ê (Claerbout, 1991,1987) built interactive filtering tools. Several authors Berlioux (1994); Clapp et al. (1994); Mora et al. (1995); van Trier (1988) have built interactive tools for velocity analysis. Cole and Nichols (1993,1992) built a generic X11 based toolkit for interactivity.

More recent efforts have been focused on expanding Rick Ottolini's viewing program Ricksep. Clapp (2001) added the ability to view multiple datasets simultaneously and built hooks to allow processes like interactive NMO analysis. Chen and Clapp (2006) expanded on this work by adding the ability to overlay datasets and including the capability to display well logs and other data types. Two problems more further expanding Ricksep challenging. First, Ricksep was written in C rather than an object oriented language more appropriate to graphics. Second34, it uses the Motif graphics library, whose future is uncertain.

In this paper, we present a new slice viewing program Hyperview. Hyperview is written in C++ using the QT library. It preserves almost all of the capabilities of Ricksep while adding numerous additional interactive features. This paper is broadly broken into three parts. The first part gives an overview of Hyperview. This is followed by a description the various menu and keyboard options available. The last portion of the paper is devoted to the design of the viewer and ideas for how it can be extended.

Hypercube viewer