Computer Graphics Courseware

Abstract

A lot of courseware tools suffer from the almost mutually exclusive goals of ease of usability on the one hand and extensibility and flexibility on the other hand. In most cases the tools are either ready-to-use applications (e.g. a virtual lab) or complex tool sets which need a long period of domain-specific adjustment. This paper presents the courseware environment AlgoViz which primarily addresses this problem. The AlgoViz project provides a software collection which is currently focused on the visualization of fundamental computer graphics algorithms and geometric modeling concepts. The intention is to build a collection of components, that can easily be combined to new applications. Supporting a purely visual programming paradigm, AlgoViz offers the possibility to create new demonstration applications without having to write a single line of source code. To demonstrate its potential AlgoViz comes with a variety of examples already forming a valuable computer graphics tutorial.