Personal Experiences of Providing and Using Research Prototypes

Abstract

I report on my personal experiences as a student, researcher, supervisor, and collaborator about providing and using research prototype software (i. e., demos). Based on an analysis of my own research activities in computer graphics and visualization, I discuss problems of providing demo software for our own projects, problems of running such software years after the release, and problems of accessing such prototypes after several years. I conclude that both source code and demos should be encouraged, provide some recommendations on how to do the latter, and call for a more active support of sharing this part of a scientific contribution within the Open Science movement.