Alice is provided with an excellent Tutorial at http://www.alice.org. These notes contain mostly queries about the demonstration you will see in today's lecture.

Alice is intended to provide an easily used virtual world construction set that hides from its users the details of the coordinate system. As such, it uses "turtle graphics" concepts. Motion is described in terms of the front, left, right and back of the object itself.

You can download Alice from the site listed above,  if you would like to consider using it for Lab 2. My current impression is that you would find it a very nice system in which to work, though you probably would want to get the Advanced Information (linked at the bottom of the basic tutorial) in order to work past some of the "training wheels" in the Alice introductory material.
 

Query 10.1. Alice's actions use the animation technique called "ease in-ease out". What does this mean? Give a couple of examples, e. g. the snowman's walking and the windmill's rotation.

Query 10.2. Alice uses a scene graph but it is deliberately simpler than the VRML scene graph. Describe some of those simplifications.

Query 10.3. What happened in the demo when we executed this command? Why?

bunny.head.pointat(bunny.rightarm)

Query 10.4. What happened when we typed several commands into the script and then executed it? Was this what we expected to happen?

Query 10.5. Where can you get geometric models for Alice?

Query 10.6. Consider the "AsSeenBy" detail, in which a modeling transformation on a particular object is related to another object in the scene. How would you implement such a feature in VRML? (By this I mean, assume someone gave you a specification to model the windmill and the horse in VRML code, and to include a scripted action by which the horse could run around the mill - without causing the mill to rotate!

Back to the course index
Back to the course syllabus
Back to the previous lecture
Onward to the next lecture