Bug#127746: RFP: LCAVision - scientific visualization tool

["Steven G. Johnson" <stevenj@ab-initio.mit.edu>]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist

>From their web site (http://zeus.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~miksa/LCAVision.html):

LCA Vision is free scientific visualization tool that started in 1998 as a
remake of an older LCA program you may or may not know called 4D2.  Its
features include:

    * simple and parallel isosurfacing
    * fast and simple slicing
    * contour lines slicing
    * carpet plotting, or elevation-mapped slicing
    * threshold, or eroded "cutaway" slicing
    * volumetric rendering with a configurable transparency ramp
    * hedgehog vector visualization
    * streamlines vector visualization
    * particle visualization
    * AMR (Adaptive Mesh Refinement) bounding box and basic isosurfacing
    * coloring by colormaps, colors, datasets, and more
    * easy render window interaction, camera options, and a 3D cursor
    * wysiwyg render window write to tiff
    * configurable coordinate axes
    * remote visualization capabilities

All of the dependencies of LCA Vision (Vtk, FLTK, HDF) are already in
Debian.

They claim "we are open source," but they don't actually include any
license in their code or on their web site, as far as I can tell.  (Such
carefreeness is all too common in the scientific community,
unfortunately.)  However, probably polite, informative emails could
rectify the situation.  (They include a fair amount of code with an
X11-like license, e.g. Vtk, so I'll bet they could be convinced to use
that.)

Thanks for looking into this--the program looked interesting, so I thought
I'd bring it to your attention.

Cordially,
Steven G. Johnson