a GUI for a physical simulation system, which was used by an
undergraduate
class this spring to design exhibits for the
Carnegie Science Center The system's name refers to the McDonald's commercials of a few years ago, in which two basketball players described and then made outrageous shots -- e.g. out the gym window, bounce off the billboard, across the freeway, bounce off the moving truck, off the flagpole, into the gym through another window, and through the hoop. The descriptions of the shots always ended with the phrase "Nothin' but net", meaning that the ball didn't touch the basket's hoop or backboard. Achieving this requires precise control of the ball's position and velocity as it approaches the basket. McDonald's of course had the luxury of being able to stop the camera and film these wild sequences in discontinuous segments. To produce equivalent animations as single non-stop sequences without sacrificing physical reality (or at least the appearance of it) requires a system such as the one I was developing.
Cheating Impulses: Scripting Control Plus Physical Realism for Animation -- Abstract of my presentation at the ACM student research poster contest, San Jose, February 27-28 1997.
a GUI for a physical simulation system, which was used by an
undergraduate
class this spring to design exhibits for the
Carnegie Science Center
an automated system for aligning two images and
combining them into an
image mosaic.