I am looking at creating a web site showing a 3D interactive view of
some 3D data. The data consists of a large number (100's to 1000's) of
spaghetti like fibres that riggle around in a 3D space.  I want to be
able to rotate round the shapes and to zoom in and out of the view on
the web site.  At the moment Matlab has been used to view these fibres
using the streamtubes function to plot the trajectories of the fibres
from the coordinate data of their position.

I have condsidered the use of shockwave to display this 3D data on the
web site.  However there doesn't seem to be a simple way of converting
the 3D spaces created in Matlab into director so they can be converted
in to Shockwave viewable files.

My question is: what ways are there to either: a)convert the existing
3D representation of data in Matlab into director so they can be run
in Shockwave b) instead of using Matlab, how we can easily import the
data (from a large series of coordinate points in flat files) and
render them in some other software that allows a creation of an
interactive representation of the data on the Web(not necessarily
shockwave).

Considerations:
* I am open to different software suggestions.
* if is possible to create and automated work flow from importing the
data (from coordinate points) through to producing the interactive
display on the web site this would be a considerable advantage.
* since there is quite a lot of data then speed of performance of the
interactive 3D representaion on the client is critical.
* We need an idea of the costs of licensing for any possible software
solutions and an idea of the comparative level of work required with
each possible solution

Hello.

I don't know much about Matlab, but I know of a program other than
Shockwave that can display interactive 3D content on web pages.

It's called Blender. It's an open-source program, and has Internet
Explorer and Netscape plugins to allow interactivity on web pages.
It's pretty easy to use, and there's a large support community that
can help you with the fine points of moving your project over. Blender
can import a bunch of file-types, including VRML. It also supports
Python scripting to create objects, so you can probably import your
source data directly. Blender is completely free, and covered by the
GNU Public License. Everything you make with it is perfectly legal for
commercial use. I'm not sure how fast it would run with that much
data, though.

I hope this helps.