My project for illiMath 2006 is the creation of a real-time interactive computer animation (RTICA) in the Syzygy/POV-Ray platform currently under development at the Beckman Institute's ISL and at Duke University.

Raytracing is an approach to image rendering fundamentally different from polygon rendering in its treatment of surfaces and light.

RTICA's

• spi-sponge.py uses adaptive recursion to expedite real-time rendering of a (user-controlled) localized portion of the Menger sponge.
• tesserpov.py allows the Syzygy user to rotate a three-dimensional wireframe projection of a tesseract, and to manipulate a hand-held polyhedron corresponding to the resulting model.

Template

As a means of ``rapid prototyping'' for existing POV-Ray scene files, I developed szgpovskel.py, which allows the user to bring POV-Ray scenes into Syzygy without modification (in many, if not most, cases).

Techniques

Interactive simulation requires more than immersion. How do we effect changes in a szgpov-based RTICA at the POV-Ray scene description level, from within the virtual environment?

Interactive parameter passing.

References

Good tips for giving an academic talk: http://www.si.umich.edu/~pne/PDF/howtotalk.pdf

I coordinated the design of our im2006 T-shirt.