Figure 6.1: WWW6 Logo
Music
California surf harmonies and theremin
Animation
WWW6's logo was probably the biggest challenge we had in animating the early logos. SVG is a 2D system and here we had an obviously 3D logo. We started looking at the possibility of doing a genuine 3D hidden line elimination system with lighting on top of SVG but decided in the time available that it was not feasible. So we then considered doing a simple 3D wireframe system. In the 1970s we had used a system called CAMPER to do 3D wireframe animations and so we had the idea of doing a simple rewrite of the system using XSLT to generate the SVG output. Unfortunately even that proved impossible due to the programming capabilities in CAMPER so in the end we settled for something similar but not identical to CAMPER which we called PAEPOS. In the back of our minds we thought it would be possible for our MSc students to create the system as a piece of Coursework if we could demonstrate it was feasible.
As shown below, what was needed was the ability to define 3D objects, move them around in the 3D plane and be able to animate the perspective viewing system as shown in the Figure 6.2
Figure 6.2: PAEPOS System
Later, the facilities in PAEPOS became the basis for the Path_ology scene definition facilities. One of our students, Peter Gould, enhanced the basic PAEPOS system to become a genuine 3D system.