LightStone capabilities
LightStone provides complete, but easy to use, access to research
level spectrometric simulation opportunities. It may be used, with intuitive
ease, by
- users who want the most advanced spectrometric computer simulations,
without having any contact whatsoever with the underlying optical calculus;
- power users, who exclusively want to deal with optical calculus matrices
and vectors; &
- everyone in between these two extremes.
LightStone consists of more than 300 blocks that range from intuitive
implementations of simple optical components, and very complicated sub-systems,
all the way through blocks that allow users to directly input any possible
static or dynamic optical vectors or matrices. As a consequence of the wide
range of blocks provided in the LightStone libraries, users can easily
find their own "comfort level" in spectrometric simulation. This
process is also greatly facilitated by provision of more than 100 free,
annotated models that span the difficulty range from novice modeller to
University level researcher. For cross-platform purposes, the LightStone
library names are the same on both platforms:
LightStone library names (same on both platforms)
| Macintosh |
Windows-based PC |
| General1.LIX |
General1.LIX |
| General2.LIX |
General2.LIX |
| Monochrome.LIX |
Monochrome.LIX |
| Polychrome.LIX |
Polychrome.LIX |
To accomodate a wide range of possibilities and user preferences, LightStone
offers the following capabilites:
User choice of optical calculus
- Users may choose that optical simulations be performed using either
the Jones optical calculus or the Mueller optical calculus, since both
are completely implemented. Users who wish to avoid contact with the optical
calculus may simply use the default choices of optical calculus.
User choice of simulation chromaticity
- Users may specify a purely monochromatic simulation, simply by using
optical components exclusively from the Monochrome.LIX library in
LightStone. Alternatively, users may specify polychromatic simulation,
with the number of user-specified colors modelled ranging from 1 through
100,001. These polychromatic simulations simply require optical
components exclusively from the Polychrome.LIX library in LightStone.
User choice of wavelengths or wavenumbers
- In polychromatic simulations, users may specify that the modelled colors
be specified either in wavelengths, with nanometer units, or in wavenumbers,
with reciprocal centimeter units.
Source code for all blocks
- Source code is provided for all blocks in all of the LightStone
libraries. This makes it easy for users to see exactly what is going on
and to prepare modified blocks, program desired new blocks, etc.
Non-optical simulations
- For simulations that do not involve optical blocks, LightStone
provides two libraries, General1.LIX and General2.LIX, of
non-optical blocks. LightStone's non-optical blocks are fully
compatible with the continuous process blocks in Extend's provided
libraries. LightStone blocks
- look highly professional (i.e., have nice icons, with restrained
use of color, that print well with 300 dpi monochrome laser printing),
- have fairly tight code with plenty of useful comments, &
- each block has highly useful "Help" text.
