Mage/Kinemage

Mage, or Kinemage as it is sometimes called, is a scripting language developed for 3-dimensional presentations of stick and ball models of structures.  Its author's original intent was for illustrating molecular structure but it became obvious that any stick and ball structure, including degenerate structures such as stick figures or distributions of balls in space were appropriate subjects.  Any situation in which a third dimension is a useful perspective is an appropriate subject. 

This host site is particularly interested in using Mage as a way of looking at ionic flux vectors in space about a source or sink, Fig 1.  Alternately we are interested in looking at any three dimensions of multivariate data which might be improved by viewing with a 3-D viewer capable of creating stereo pairs, Fig 2. 

 

Fig 1.  Proton flux vectors emanating from a pair of artificial sources: 

 

The Stereo Image of H-flux in space about 2 sources demonstrates the potential strength of this approach.  The vectors point back toward a point origin in space which can be calculated from the closest coincidence of the included vectors.  This method of displaying vector data provides a visually pleasing image as well as a mathematically sound presentation of the data set.

 

Fig 2.  Stereo Image of Lymantria dispar wing shape components analysed by Principal Warp Analysis. Here, Singular Values 1, 2 and 6 are plotted for average wing shapes for individual population sites (small diamonds) North American, European, Russian and Asian populations (color coded). The large colored balls are regional population means. A population mean for the Indian species Lymantria obfusca is used as an outgroup.