Tony T. C. Lau
A Programming Library for the Construction of 3-D Widgets
| Degree: | M.Sc. |
| Type: | thesis |
| Year: | 1994 |
| Supervisor: | David R. Forsey |
| Electronic: |
![[PDF]](/labs/imager/th/icons/pdf.gif){kind=icon} , 378684 bytes |
| Hardcopy: | 91 pages |
Abstract
3-D graphical user interfaces (3-D GUIs) may be beneficial to application programs that need to manipulate 3-D objects or multi-dimensional data. However, most existing 3-D graphics programming systems do not provide primitives for building 3-D GUIs; instead, programmers have to deal directly with input device events and 3-D graphics. Sytems that do either are research systems that are not available to application programmers or are difficult to extend. For these reasons, explorations in the use of 3-D GUIs have been difficult.An extensible and object-oriented 3-D Widget Programming Library is implemented. It is an extension to Inventor (a widely available 3-D programming library) and lets programmers construct new widgets (3-D scene objects with interactive behaviors) using four types of high-level components that are responsible for user interface, visual feedback, application interface and general computation. A widget built with this library is able to control and display one or more application states, interact with users in a click-drag-release fashion, and convey the application states through the relative positions and orientations among the widget's parts. A widget interfaces with an application program through either direct attachments to scene objects or callback functions.
@MastersThesis{Lau1994,
author = {Tony T. C. Lau, M.Sc},
title = {A Programming Library for the Construction of 3-D Widgets},
school = {UBC},
year = {1994},
supervisor = {David R. Forsey},
}