A Webware For Computer Graphics Education
Mustafa Sanver, Li Yang, Eric Gillispie · 2020
This paper presents live and interactive webware for online learning of computer graphics concepts.A list of demos is provided.Each demo presents a concept in computer graphics by showing a 3D real world scene beside a 2D rendering scene with a list of graphics functions.Each demo allows users to interactively change the parameters and the order of execution of these graphics functions.Changing the parameters of the functions will produce the 2D rendering result from the 3D real world scene.The visual effects of user interaction will be reflected immediately in the 3D real world scene and the 2D rendering result.The webware was written by using the GL4Java library that provides native OpenGL binding for Java.Nate Robin's well-known demos were implemented.These include translation, projection, light effect, texture mapping, and so on.New demos were also developed with pedagogical considerations in mind to emphasize the differences between model transformation and view transformation.Although the webware is designed for computer graphics learning the methodology is generic and can easily be applied to other disciplines or courses that require heavy visual presentation.This webware reflects our long-term efforts to develop web-based course material to show principles and techniques in computer science in an interactive way.We did this by having the related algorithms run live in the background and allowing students to interact with them in a web browser.