Home

VP1, or Virtual Point 1, is the interactive 3D event display for the ATLAS experiment at CERN.

VP1 provides useful tools for the understanding of the physics hidden inside proton-proton collision events and to help the ATLAS experts and developers with the debugging of reconstruction and simulation software and physics analysis.

VP1 also provides a modern 3D-enabled display for the ATLAS control room at Point 1.

VP1 runs within the ATLAS offline software framework, “Athena”, and thus provides direct access to the same data and algorithms that are used, for example, in the reconstruction of physics events.

Being part of the ATLAS software framework, VP1 is capable of accessing and visualizing all ATLAS data natively, at all steps of the data workflow. All data that Athena can produce or access, both transient and persistent ones, VP1 can visualize it.

VP1 is coded entirely in C++. It depends on the “Qt5” C++ toolkit for the user interface and relies on the Inventor/OpenGL framework for 3D graphics (“Coin” and “SoQt”). It utilizes a flexible plugin architecture for the actual interaction with ATLAS data and algorithms, allowing easy parallel development by multiple contributors.