Back in the early Eighties, when I coined the acronym "RTICA" it was wishful thinking that we should be able to do this in the classroom lab, in our offices, at home (!). By the end of the decade, Silicon Graphics Iris workstations had made it possible. By 1992 I could cast the "C" to "CAVE", the recursively expanding acronym for "CAVE Automatic Virtual Environments".
The acronym is intended to be pronounced, not spelled out. Try it. Make it sound like "articae": many artful things. The "A" comes with several endings too, "animation", "animator", "animatrix". And even "animation" has some welcome double meanings: the process of animating, and that which is so produced. Similarly "animator", like "editor", is both the human doing it, and the computer tool with which (s)he does it.
There is, as yet, no such word as "animatrix". There should be! To animate is to endow a thing with a soul wherewith to come alive. Isn't that why we write computer graphics programs: to make pictures come alive.
Coding an RTICA is also the right way to really understand certain mathematical transformations, called "homotopies." But that topic needs to be linked to elsewhere.
[More later, 6jun99]