Processes in a functional animation system

Abstract

We investigate the problem of rapidly prototyping animation sequences. Conventional programming lan-guages such as 'C result in programs that are notoriously difficult to develop and to change. We show how a functional approach leads to a fresh perspective on the problem. A compact set of primitive operations over movies (i.e. picture tequencea) is used as the basis for an animation system. We investigate the problem of interaction between components of an animated sequence and then show how lazy evaluation may be used to devise a process-oriented metaphor within a purely functional framework. This allows us to arrange the interaction of animation sequences by encapsulating them within processes.