4 Ongoing research

An system for interactive animation is implemented at our department. This software is provided with Java wrappers to make writing scripts easier and to facilitate interfacing with other software. Ultimately, everything should be written in Java and the screen objects and connections should be available as Java Beans.

A next step is to develop a dedicated construction tool to build scenes out of these components. This leads to research issues such as how to build a low threshold user interface to specify complex and time dependent behaviour. Furthermore, many optimisations that are made by designers that know the mechanism of the animation system are difficult to generate automatically. In real-time animation these optimisations are often crucial for the performance.

As mentioned before, constraint correction is in principle a global task that is difficult to distribute over components. In this area reseacrh is carried out.