ANIMATOR

The advent of the web has opened up new opportunities for researcher's to present their ideas, in both written and graphical forms. SEP's initial efforts to take advantage of this new medium was with text and either static gif images, or pre-created mpeg movies. This has proved effective, but extremely limiting. In addition, SEP's software to display images, vplot, suffers from a lack of interactivity.

The Animator offers a solution to both these problems. The Animator (see Figure 3) can display a series of images like vplot, but offers additional features:

• selective frame viewing - the user can go through the series of frames provided and choose a subset to view in a movie format.
• interactive windowing - a portion of the display can be zoomed in on.

 

animjava
Figure 3 The animator showing a frame. If you have Java capabilities, click on the figure interact button to go to the Animator.

The Animator reads in byte data from a SEPJava (see Appendix B) file, and creates images from this data. As each image is created, it is displayed and a graph at the bottom of the applet is updated. When all images have been created, the Animator enters an edit mode, in which you can create a custom movie by manipulating several parameters via mouse commands or keystrokes. A more detailed description can be found in Appendix C.