Electromagnetic waves are an ubiquitous phenomenon in our daily life.
Radio, television, cellular and even light are concerned with them.
Electrical and communications engineering is the science coping with
them.
Students in this subject have to be familiar with electromagnetic
waves. Embarrassingly they are quite difficult to understand and to
visualize. This project GLWaves is inteded to assist in exactly
that task.
GLWaves is written in FreePascal
and runs on Linux. But beside rewriting the user interface, which is
based on GTK, it should be quite easily portable to other platforms.
OpenGL is used to visualize 3D images and animations allowing an easy
to understand and graphic presentation. It is recommended that you have
a hardware accelerated 3D graphic card. On a Pentium III 800Mhz a
relatively complex scene in the 400x300 pixel window gets flickering
a bit but doesn't annoy. If you can live with that, you probably don't
need a 3D graphic card.
In the current state GLWaves has simulations for
- wave functions
- polarisatzion
After starting GLWaves it offers a standard menu bar where you
can choose the demo you want to run. After selecting one, the main window
enlarges to fill in a list of sub-demos, adjustable parameters and
options what to display and what not. A second window is opened with the
3D animation. On demand additional windows are opened to show parameters
like the Poincare sphere. Selecting another demo closes the previously
opened window and opens a new one with the chosen demo.
This program is a university project at the
University of technology, Vienna,
Austria. So all texts and descriptions are held in German. Translating
GLWaves to other languages (especially English) is a thing to be
done in the future. All comments and symbol names are in English.
GLWaves is distributed under the terms of the
GNU General Public
License (GPL). You may freely download and distribute it as
long as you supply the copyright information.
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