Web-based algorithm animation

Marc Najork
2001 Proceedings of the 38th conference on Design automation - DAC '01  
SRC's charter is to advance the state of the art in computer systems by doing basic and applied research in support of our company's business objectives. Our interests and projects span scalable systems (including hardware, networking, distributed systems, and programming-language technology), the Internet (including the Web, e-commerce, and information retrieval), and human/computer interaction (including user-interface technology, computer-based appliances, and mobile computing). an
more » ... ment of the authors and individual contributors to the work; and all applicable portions of the copyright notice. Copying, reproducing, or republishing for any other purpose shall require a license with payment of fee to the Systems Research Center. All rights reserved. Abstract Over the past few years, we have developed JCAT, a system for building Web-based collaborative active textbooks on algorithms. JCAT augments the expressive power of Web pages for publishing passive multimedia information with a full-fledged interactive algorithm animation system. Views of a running program can reside on different machines; in an electronic classroom or distance learning setting, a teacher controls the animation, while students view the animation by pointing their Web browsers at the appropriate page. In this report, we integrate our earlier work on using interactive 3D graphics for algorithm animation into the JCAT system, and we present three new animations. The JCAT architecture is well-suited for 3D animations because each user can interact with the 3D views locally, independent of the views on other machines. The ability to interactively control a 3D scene provides motion cues that are crucial for resolving ambiguities of 3D scenes displayed on flat screens.
doi:10.1145/378239.379013 dblp:conf/dac/Najork01 fatcat:g333hhwlcfbxnoh5amo53t25zq