"Bakul Shah" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > I am not sure what I mean :-) Guess some sort of 3D UI. A > way to deal with 3d objects. ...
You need to distinguish between a genuine 3D display, which is extremely rare, a stereoscopic display, which is not as rare (I have played Tomb Raider on a PC in stereo), and a 3D *model* rendered in 2D, which is pretty common these days. 3D rendering is computationally intensive, and in modern times it is usually done by sending the model to a so-called 3D graphics card along with lighting and viewing parameters; updating just the viewing parameters is sufficient to view a static model from all aspects. For 3D games a lot of compromises are made in order to be able to supply new model information at a good frame rate as the modeled objects move in real time. You might look into free 3D rendering software such as the POV ray-tracer or the BRL-CAD package (on SourceForge I believe), which I contributed to in its early days. These provide modeling and viewing tools, and in the case of BRL-CAD there are programming library facilities for interrogating the model geometry, for applications like ballistic vulnerability studies. *Maybe* these could be ported to Plan 9; I suspect APE would be helpful. If there is an X-Windows server for Plan 9 it might not be too hard.
