[SciPy-User] SciPy for Computational Geometry

[hayne at sympatico.ca]

Maybe have a look at "microsphere interpolation":
http://www.dudziak.com/how_microsphere_projection_works.php
(Perhaps just looking at the diagram at the bottom of that page would  
suffice for a start.)
This is not a Python implementation, but it might give you some ideas.

--
Cameron Hayne
macdev at hayne.net

On 31-Oct-11, at 5:14 PM, Lorenzo Isella wrote:
> This is admittedly a bit off topic, but I wonder if anybody on the  
> list
> is familiar with this problem (which should belong to computational
> geometry) and is able to point me to an implementation (possibly  
> relying
> on scipy).
> Imagine that you are sitting at the origin (0,0,0) of a 3D coordinate
> system and that you are looking at a set of (non-overlapping) spheres
> (all the spheres are identical and with radius R=1).
> You ask yourself how many spheres you can see overall.
> The result is in general a (positive) real number as one sphere may
> partially eclipse another sphere for an observer in the origin (e.g.  
> if
> one sphere is located at (0,0,5) and the other (0,0.3,10)).
> Does anybody know an algorithm to calculate this quantity efficiently?
> I have in mind (for now at least) configurations of less that 100
> spheres, so hopefully this should not be too demanding.
> I had a look at
> http://www.qhull.org/
> but I am not 100% sure that this is the way to go.