Thanks for the prod, Andrew.  (And thanks to Don S for prodding yesterday.)

Now there's a picture on the FieldTrip page [1].  The shading is done using normals generated via derivatives from the vector-space package [2].

[1] http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/FieldTrip
[2] http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/vector-space

  - Conal

On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 10:27 AM, Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin@btinternet.com> wrote:
Conal Elliott wrote:
FieldTrip [1] is a library for functional 3D graphics.  It is intended for building static, animated, and interactive 3D geometry, efficient enough for real-time synthesis and display.  Since FieldTrip is functional, one describes what models are, not how to render them (being rather than doing).

Surfaces are described as functions from 2D space to 3D space.  As such, they are intrinsically curved rather than faceted.  Surface rendering tessellates adaptively, caching tessellations in an efficient, infinite data structure (from the MemoTrie library) for reuse.  Surface normals are computed automatically and exactly, using the derivative tools in the vector-space library.

For animation or interaction, FieldTrip can be used with the Reactive [2] library for functional reactive programming (and possibly other animation frameworks).  By design, FieldTrip is completely orthogonal to any formulation or implementation of FRP.  The reactive-fieldtrip [3] library links Reactive and FieldTrip.

FieldTrip now has a mailing list [4] and a feature/bug tracker [5].

Sounds very interesting, but... what, no pictures? From a library especially designed for generating pictures? :-)