This card is a 'still' taken from a VRML animation. To see the full animation, click one of the following.
High Performance System
Medium Performance System
Lower Performance System
Lower Performance System, Adjustable Window
BUT:
You will need a VRML browser
and some fairly good 'kit'.
Note: The animation has been tested with Cortona and
Cosmoplayer. I have not tried Blaxun Contact or any
other browser and would be grateful for any feedback.
To download the (free) Cortona VRML browser,
click here
The animation was produced on a 450 MHz PC with a Matrox 200 graphics accelerator card, an SB16 sound card, supporting general MIDI, and Cortona 2.2 as the VRML browser. With that system the movement was somewhat jerky. I have upgraded my video- card to a GeForce4 MX440 which gives a faster frame-rate and much smoother motion. However systems with lower specifications still abound and I have supplied alternative versions of the animation. If, using the Lower Performance choice, your system still shows movement which is too jerky, select the Adjustable Window version and reduce the window size to increase the frame-rate.
Both figures in this model, being based on (although not conformant with) the Humanoid Animation Group's "Specification for a Standard Humanoid"(external links), are capable of individual movement, although in this performance only the dancer is animated.
Appologies to those of you who know the dance, or at least, the genre. The most difficult part of this animation has been the analysis of the dance itself, down to what the dancer should be doing on each beat or half beat. All I have succeeded in doing is to get a very rough approximation. Currently, when run at a sufficiently high frame-rate (~17 fps) to give fairly smooth animation, the dance is too languid and the jumps too shallow or non-existent. A lot more tweaking will be needed to get it right, if I still have the enthusiasm.
For some detail about how this animation was produced click here.