SUMMON provides rapid prototyping of 2D visualizations. By heavily relying on the python scripting language, SUMMON allows the user to rapidly prototype a custom visualization for their data, without the overhead of designing a graphical user interface or recompiling native code. By simplifying the task of designing a visualization, users can spend more time on understanding their data.
SUMMON is designed to be a fast interface for developing interactive visualizations (via scene graphs) for OpenGL. Although python libraries already exist for accessing OpenGL, python is relatively slow for real-time interaction with large visualizations (trees with 100,000 leaves, sparse matrices with a million non-zeros, etc.). Therefore, with SUMMON all real-time interaction is handled with compiled native C++ code (via extension module). Python is only executed in the construction and occasional interaction with the visualization. This arrangement provides the best of both worlds.
- Python C++ extension module.
- Fast OpenGL graphics.
- Drawing arbitrary points, lines, polygons, text with python scripting.
- Binding inputs (keyboard, mouse, hotspots) to any python function.




