Abstract: "This report describes a variety of 3D interactive graphics techniques for visualizing programs. The third dimension provides an extra degree of freedom for conveying information, much as color adds to black-and-white images, animation adds to static images, and sound adds to silent animations. The examples in this report illustrate three fundamental uses of 3D: for providing additional information about objects that are intrinsically two-dimensional, for uniting multiple views, and for capturing a history of execution. The application of dynamic three-dimensional graphics to program visualization is largely unexplored. A videotape of these animations is available."

Driven by the demands of research and the entertainment industry, the techniques of animation are pushed to render increasingly complex objects with ever-greater life-like appearance and motion. This rapid progression of knowledge and technique impacts professional developers, as well as students. Developers must maintain their understanding of conceptual foundations, while their animation tools become ever more complex and specialized. The second edition of Rick Parent's Computer Animation is an excellent resource for the designers who must meet this challenge. The first edition established its reputation as the best technically oriented animation text. This new edition focuses on the many recent developments in animation technology, including fluid animation, human figure animation, and soft body animation. The new edition revises and expands coverage of topics such as quaternions, natural phenomenon, facial animation, and inverse kinematics. The book includes up-to-date discussions of Maya scripting and the Maya C++ API, programming on real-time 3D graphics hardware, collision detection, motion capture, and motion capture data processing. - New up-to-the-moment coverage of hot topics like real-time 3D graphics, collision detection, fluid and soft-body animation and more! - Companion site with animation clips drawn from research & entertainment and code samples - Describes the mathematical and algorithmic foundations of animation that provide the animator with a deep understanding and control of technique

This book arose out of an invited feature article on visualization and opti mization that appeared in the ORSA Journal on Computing in 1994. That article briefly surveyed the current state of the art in visualization as it ap plied to optimization. In writing the feature article, it became clear that there was much more to say. Apparently others agreed, and thus this book was born. The book is targeted primarily towards the optimization community rather than the visualization community. Although both optimization and visualization both seek to help people understand complex problems, prac titioners in one field are generally unaware of work in the other field. Given the common goals of the respective fields, it seemed fruitful to consider how each can contribute to the other. One might argue that this book should not be focused specifically on optimization but on decision making in general. Perhaps, but it seems that there is sufficient material to create a book targeted specifically to optimization. Certainly many of the ideas presented in the book are appli cable to other areas, including computer simulation, decision theory and stochastic modeling. Another book could discuss the use of visualization in these areas.

Abstract: "Geometric algorithms and data structures are often easiest to understand visually, in terms of the geometric objects they manipulate. Indeed, most papers in computational geometry rely on diagrams to communicate the intuition behind the results. Algorithm animation uses dynamic visual images to explain algorithms. Thus it is natural to present geometric algorithms, which are inherently dynamic, via algorithm animation. The accompanying videotape presents a video review of geometric animations; the review was premiered at the 1992 ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry. The video review includes single-algorithm animations and sample graphic displays from 'workbench' systems for implementing multiple geometric algorithms. This report contains short descriptions of each video segment."

Here is an ideal textbook on software visualization, written especially for students and teachers in computer science. It provides a broad and systematic overview of the area including many pointers to tools available today. Topics covered include static program visualization, algorithm animation, visual debugging, as well as the visualization of the evolution of software. The author's presentation emphasizes common principles and provides different examples mostly taken from seminal work. In addition, each chapter is followed by a list of exercises including both pen-and-paper exercises as well as programming tasks.

This hypermedia CD-ROM provides an ideal format for the visual explanation of complex algorithms contained in the text Introduction to Algorithms, by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, and Ronald L. Rivest. It contains three complementary components: a hypertext version of the book itself, interactive animations of the most important algorithms, and movies explaining the use of the hypertext interface and the animations. The hypertext, including the figures, is stored in HyperCard stacks. It contains tools for navigation, text annotation, tracking of preexisting links, full-text search, and the adding of links and paths through the document. This enables instructors and students to customize the hypertext easily for classroom and personal use. The animations that are implemented in HyperCard are linked with the hypertext and can be controlled interactively by the user. They also include extensive on-line help, making them self-contained. Some animations include scripting facilities allowing users to program animations of specific data structures. The movies ("talking heads" and demonstrations) provide a way to view noninteractive versions of the algorithm animations. These are stored on the CD in QuickTime format. Peter Gloor is Research Associate in the Laboratory for Computer Science, and Scott Dynes is a Ph.D candidate in the Eaton Peabody Laboratory, both at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Irene Lee was formerly a graduate student at Harvard University. Animated algorithms: Asymptotic Notation. Recursion. Simple Data Structures. Sorting Algorithms and Analysis. Hashing. Binary Trees. Red-Black Trees. Minimum Spanning Trees. Single-Source Shortest Paths. Fibonacci Heaps. Huffman Encoding. Dynamic Programming. Matrix Multiplication. Matrix Inverse. Convex Hull. Genetic Algorithms. Neural Networks.

This is a college-level introductory textbook of algorithms and data structures with application to graphics and geometry. This textbook, released under a Creative Commons Share Alike (CC BY SA) license, is presented in its original format with the academic content unchanged. It was authored by Jurg Nievergelt (ETH Zurich) and Klaus Hinrichs (Institut fur Informatik) and provided by the University of Georgia's Global Textbook Project. Textbookequity.org/algorithms-and-data-structures/ Photo Credit: Renato Keshet (GFDL) commons.wikimedia.org Contents Part I: Programming environments for motion, graphics, and geometry Part II: Programming concepts: beyond notation Part IV: Complexity of problems and algorithms Part V: Data structures Textbook Equity Edition http: //textbookequity.org/algorithms-and-data-structures