TITLE:
Islay3D—A Programming Environment for Authoring Interactive 3D Animations in Terms of State-Transition Diagram
AUTHORS:
Dandy Ling Kwong, Michitoshi Niibori, Shusuke Okamoto, Masaru Kamada, Tatsuhiro Yonekura
KEYWORDS:
3D; Visual Programming Language; Computer Games; State Transition Diagram; Web Service
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Software Engineering and Applications,
Vol.7 No.3,
March
27,
2014
ABSTRACT: An educational programming
language is a programming language that is designed primarily as a learning
instrument and not so much as a tool for writing programs for production.
Three-dimensional (3D) interactive animations provide an effective means to
engage the attention of the audience to learn programming language.
Traditionally, creating 3D games had been difficult as it requires specialized
programming skills. However, it had been proven that the state-transition
diagram, which is the most fundamental principle for automata, is intuitively
so comprehensive that even children can create programs for interactive
animations and video games in the two-dimensional world. Islay3D is a
programming environment for authoring interactive 3D animations based on this
concept. In this paper, the Islay3D animation language is introduced, where a
character is modeled as an object, and its behavior is defined in term of a set
of state-transition diagrams. The interpretation of the state-transition
diagrams to JavaScript is also presented. Finally, the web-based programming
environment is introduced. With the web-based platform, the public will be able
express their creativity in creating interactive 3D animations and video games
easily from within their browser.