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[FFHAELNG99](pdf)
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François Faure, Chris Faisstnauer, Gerd Hesina, Amaury Aubel,
Marc Escher, Frédéric Labrosse, Jean-Christophe Nebel, and
Jean-Dominique Gascuel. Collaborative animation over the
network. In Proceedings of Computer
Animation, pages 107-116, Geneva, Switzerland, 1999.
The continuously increasing complexity of computer animations
makes it necessary to rely on the knowledge of various experts to
cover the different areas of computer graphics and
animation. This fact, which can be noted in many areas of
scientific working, leads to increasing effort being put into
research concerning cooperative working over the
internet. However, it still requires substantial effort and time
to combine different animation techniques in a common virtual
environment.
When trying to perform collaborative animation over a network, we
often face the problem of having to combine animation systems and
applications based on different software and hardware and using
incompatible data structures. We present an approach, based on a
client-server architecture and employing a VRML-based language as
common interchange format, that allows inhomogeneous systems to
be easily incorporated into a collaborative animation. The
applications can be freed from employing plug-ins or libraries to
link into a common animation platform; they keep a local copy of
the global scene and only need the ability to export the internal
data representation into the so called "PaVRML" language, the
language we use use to exchange data and synchronize the clients.
This approach does not only allow a number of practitioners to
share their know-how within a common animation without requiring
the huge amount of work necessary to port their application to a
common platform. It also makes it often possible in the first
place to combine the capabilities of different animation systems
into a single complex animation. Additionally, we investigate
solutions to optimize the network load for real-time
applications. In this paper we present preliminary results and
discuss the future developments of this ongoing work.
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