The Cosmo. Lab Project: Developing AstroMD, an Object Oriented, Open Source Visualization and Pre-analysis Tool for Astrophysical Data

Abstract. The Cosmo.Lab project, financed by the European Com-munity, has the object of developing AstroMD, a tool of visualization and analysis of astrophysical data. AstroMD responds to the require-ments proposed by several research fields: data coming from cosmologi-cal simulations, from observational catalogues and extended objects like radiosources or clusters of galaxies. AstroMD exploits also the most ad-vanced visualization technology, based on virtual reality, in order to build a leading edge instrument for scientific research. However it is a scalable software which can be used also on PCs or workstations. It is open-source and freely downloadable from the web sit