[ REQ 5478]: geomview in general relativity

[leo at newton.maths.monash.edu.au]

Hi Folks,
         Can you tell me if anybody has adapted geomview to arbitrary
metrics? In particular, has anybody used geomview for visualization of
the geometry near a black hole?

I ask this because it is closely related to my research area. I construct
numerical representations of the metric of space and time by pieceing together
large sets of 4-simplices. The metric of the space-time is encoded in the
leg-lengths of the 4-simplices. The idea is much like the approximation of
a curved 2-d surface by a set of flat triangles. I would like to use
some variant of geomview so that I can take my students on guided tours
of black holes.

So my main questions are,
  i) Has anybody done this?
 ii) Are the changes to geomview difficult?
iii) Would you mind if I employed somebody to look into such a project?
     (ie. are there any copyright issues).

Thanks for your help,

Leo Brewin, Department of Mathematics,
            Monash University,
            Clayton. Vic. 3168
            Australia.

leo at newton.maths.monash.edu.au

ps. I've had trouble with geomview on my DEC Alpha 3000. It seems to hang
after which the window manager fails to update the window for geomview.
I'm running DEC OSF/1, with X11R6 and I'm using tvfvwm as my window manager.
I've got 32 Mbyte of memory, though the same problem has occurred on a machine
with 128 Mbyte. Any clues?

Thanks, again.