Research types like abstracts. Here's one for Cichlid:
Cichlid is a visualization tool for rapidly visualizing arbitrary data sets in high-quality 3D, while allowing the viewer to explore and interact with the data sets in real time. It was designed with remote data generation and machine independence in mind; data is transmitted via TCP from any number of sources (data servers) to the visualization code (the client), which displays them concurrently.
Cichlid is written entirely in C, using the OpenGL & GLUT graphics libraries. The code is portable and is being used on FreeBSD, Linux, and Irix platforms. The source code to Cichlid is freely available, as is the source to GLUT and an OpenGL-like implementation: Mesa. Thus the tool can be built for free, and used on standard PC hardware as well as high-end SGI workstations.
Cichlid features real-time data display, point-and-click user feedback, and dynamic data coloring and labelling. Sequences of frames may be captured in sequence for later encoding as an animation; single frames may be captured, or re-rendered at arbitrary resolutions.
Cichlid was originally created in September 1998, for the express purpose of having an interesting data visualization to present at SC'98. It was used there to visualize the IP address space utilization on the conference's OC3 network, in real-time. The resulting graph was projected on the wall of the NOC there, probably making passers-by dizzy.
Cichlid's capabilities have been vastly extended since the original SC'98 code. As it exists, it is a powerful visualization tool that touts speed, remote data collection, and data-independence.
The original author and principle developer of Cichlid is Jeff Brown, an undergraduate in the Computer Science & Engineering department at UCSD. Cichlid is his first venture into graphics programming, his first experience writing a network application, and his first "large" software engineering effort.