These tutorials are for composing real-time interactive computer animations (RTICA) which are particularly suitable for virtual environments, such as the CAVE. They have evolved over 2 decades. Their originals were written in C using Jim Clark’s IrisGL graphics libraries. From these Clark’s libraries evolved the current defacto graphics standard, OpenGL.

Although the tutorials have been partially updated they have not be revised to reflect the modern progamming paradigms of object oriented programming in C++ or Python. We will leave this task to another time.

Despite the age of the code, the geometrical concepts remain as useful as they always were. In contrast to similar literature also available on WWW, we take a frankly mathematical viewpoint, with the programs serving purely a utilitarian purpose, that of illustrating mathematics and science in an interactive way.

While my students have written games based on these tutorials, and some of their projects reached a high level of visual quality, neither of these goals shaped the composition of these tutorials. The pedagogical philosophy behind them is summarized in the last paper.

  • 1Octa.pdf illiLesson 1: Gouraud shaded octahedron with second order mouse controller (chaptrack).

  • 2Torus.pdf illiLesson 2: Lighted torus with primitive animation function (autotymer).

  • 3Skel.pdf illiSkeleton Short Summary: full featured prototype of an RTICA.

  • mritca13may.pdf Metarealistic Rendering of Real-time Interactive Computer Animations.