In the classroom it is next to impossible to draw the surfaces for anything other than cubic crystals, but with the aid of a computer it becomes possible to view even triclinic surfaces. The World Wide Web pages are designed to make the second goal available to the public. The user can choose a crystal group and elastic constant values and view the resulting surface. The user can also animate the surface as one of its constant values varies over any range. This is intended to help students understand how the values of the constants affect the geometry of the surface.
Similar features are now available for longitudinal piezoelectric surfaces.
The server scripts for the HTML forms were written in Scheme48, a compact, portable version of Scheme.