|
Conference on Domain-Specific Languages, 1997
Modeling Interactive 3D and Multimedia Animation with an Embedded Language
Conal Elliott
Microsoft Research
Abstract
While interactive multimedia animation is a very compelling
medium, few people are able to express themselves in it. There
are too many low-level details that have to do not with the
desired content--e.g., shapes, appearance and behavior--but
rather how to get a computer to present the content. For
instance, behaviors like motion and growth are generally gradual,
continuous phenomena. Moreover, many such behaviors go on
simultaneously. Computers, on the other hand, cannot directly
accommodate either of these basic properties, because they do
their work in discrete steps rather than continuously, and they
only do one thing at a time. Graphics programmers have to spend
much of their effort bridging the gap between what an animation
is and how to present it on a computer.
We propose that this situation can be improved by a change of
language, and present Fran, synthesized by complementing
an existing declarative host language, Haskell, with an embedded
domain-specific vocabulary for modeled animation. As demonstrated
in a collection of examples, the resulting animation descriptions
are not only relatively easy to write, but also highly
composable.
- View the full text of this paper in
HTML form and
PDF form.
- If you need the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it from Adobe's site.
- To become a USENIX Member, please see our Membership Information.
|
Need help? Use our Contacts page.
Technical Program