Web-based approach for very complex animations through geometric programming

In this work a high-level animation methodology oriented towards building, simulating and analyzing very complex 3D scenes is de ned. The de nition of the methodology is oriented towards ful lling two goals. The rst goal being the creation of a compact and clear de nition of complex animated geometric environments. The second goal is that such animated geometric environments can be easily updated, and that di erent animation hypothesis be easily compared and analyzed. We experiment the methodology in two settings. First we use a simple Open Inventor based animation viewer to allow local display of the animations on any system including low-cost PC's. Second we experiment a web-based visualization framework that uses as key component an animation server implementing the introduced methodology. The compactness of the language representation used turns out to be an important advantage when used for transmitting geometry and animation information over the network. Towards this end we have extended the academic language PLaSM [12] for geometry modeling, recently integrated into the collaborative and distributed 3D toolkit Shastra [3], with the ability to generate platform-independent animated scene descriptions capable of be read by low-level animation systems, such as the Shastra animation module Gati [4], or Open Inventor [17], in the following denoted as OIV. The animation methodology introduced here is implemented as an extension of the PLaSM language,