d07wals.x.g2db Page 1 of 7 Thursday, April 4, 2002 8:47:50 AM HEAD: Understanding Scene Graphs DEK Using graph-based Bio data structures to Aaron is chairman of Mantis Development, and teaches computer graphics and In- organize and manage ternet/Web application development at Boston College. He can be contacted at scene contents
[email protected]. Byline NOTE TO AUTHORS: PLEASE CHECK ALL URLs AND SPELLINGS OF NAMES CAREFULLY. Aaron E. Walsh THANK YOU. Pullquotes Before scene-graph programming Scene-graph models, we usually nodes represent represented scene objects in a scene data and behavior procedurally d07wals.x.g2db Page 2 of 7 Thursday, April 4, 2002 8:47:50 AM 2.1 cene graphs are data structures used 2.68 At the scene level, you concern your- – to organize and manage the contents – self with what’s in the scene and any as- – of hierarchically oriented scene data. – sociated behavior or interaction among – Traditionally considered a high-level – objects therein. Underlying implementa- 2.5 S – data management facility for 3D content, tion and rendering details are abstracted – scene graphs are becoming popular as – out of the scene-graph programming mod- – general-purpose mechanisms for manag- – el. In this case, you can assume that your – ing a variety of media types. MPEG-4, for 2.75 VRML browser plug-in handles low-level – instance, uses the Virtual Reality Model- – concerns. 2.10 ing Language (VRML) scene-graph pro- – – gramming model for multimedia scene – Nodes and Arcs – composition, regardless of whether 3D – As Figure 2 depicts, scene graphs consist – data is part of such content.