In the first attempt to reconstruct the structure FOTO version 2.2 from Cognivision was used. The program ran on an Apollo 10000 work station. This software package also had its own file format. Three dimensional objects are made from a set of NODES. The NODES are points in a three-dimensional space. Multiple NODES can be combined to groups called MEMBERS. The NODES in such a group span a surface in the three-dimensional space. These surfaces can be visualized by different colors. They can also be made more or less transparent.
FOTO have rotation, scaling and light setting possibilities. FOTO was used in the preliminary investigations. Because the file format is very complex the data files grow very large very fast. As FOTO is real-time visualization tool the whole object visualized has to be in the RAM of the computer. FOTO also need much RAM for calculations. This limited the maximum practical file size to around 10Mbytes which corresponds to about 500.000 pixels in the FOTO file format.
To understand the program, knowledge about the FOTO file format is needed (see reference [28]). The program was written in Fortran programming language, but because we do not actually use any of the results from the use of this program, we have chosen not to list the program. This short summary of the use of FOTO is just included to demonstrate the problems when working with large quantities of data we did here. Very little software for visualizing such quantities of data is available.