JavaView and Polymake

Polymake by Michael Joswig and Ewgenij Gawrilow is a highly flexible software system which is used by researchers in geometry to investigate geometric and combinatorial properties of convex polytopes. As a key feature it offers a wide variety of interfaces to other programs, which greatly enlarges the capabilities of the system. For visualization purposes the system primarily relies on JavaView.

This geometry has been generated with polymake. "Typical" 3-polytope in the following sense: let P be the convex hull of random points on the unit sphere in 3-space. Then its dual P' is almost always simple. Now let P'' be the convex hull of the vertices of P' minus a few (which again are chosen at random). Such a P'' is what you see here.  It is neither simplicial nor simple.

Polymake is a hybrid system where C++ client components interact with a Perl server. Interfaces to external programs are usually done in Perl; JavaView is no exception. Polymake produces a JVX file with a description of the geometry which is then piped to JavaView allowing also feedback of pick information back into Polymake.