In this article I am going to be talking about Gens, the free, open source project from Microsoft to help with visualizing geological information. For anyone who is unaware, Gens is a software project by Microsoft to allow people to create data visualization applications. The basic idea behind this software is that you can visualize data in 3D and then use mathematical techniques such as calculus, optimization, etc to get the information you are looking for. Gens was developed as a "what if" project, where Microsoft imagined what a product like Gens might look like if it were capable of doing advanced scientific analysis. After creating Gens, Microsoft made it available to the public for download for free and now it is gaining in popularity.
Gens has a large number of low-level programming changes and bug fixes, and the latest updates: Accurate color scale so all colors have the RGB value of their closest match, and a new terrain module. There are some things you need to know if you want to get started with Gens. You must know how to install it, because it is a stand-alone application. You also need to know how to run it, because it's a very lightweight software that runs on the Windows platform. Some of the best places to download Gens for free are included in the link below.
To get started with Gens, open up the application (either the Windows version or the Linux version), and search for the "Map Project" tab. This will take you to the first screen of Gens, where you will see several tabs separated into two sections: "My Computers" and " geoparts". Clicking on any tile will expand that tile in the main view of Gens, so you can zoom in and out to see each contour on the map. If you want to zoom out, hold Control while pressing the TAB key, which will switch you to the previous view.
