Abstract We have developed a software package that facilitates general‐purpose animation in four spatial dimensions. Standard features from popular 3D animation software have been included and adapted, where appropriate. Many adaptations are trivial; some have required novel solutions. Several features that are possible only in four or more dimensions have been included. The graphical user interface has been designed to be familiar to experienced 3D animators. Keyframe animation is provided by using a set of curves that defines movement in each dimension or rotation plane. An interactive viewport offers multiple visualization methods including slicing and projection. The viewport allows for both manipulation of 4D objects and navigation through virtual 4D space.

Most autonomous mobile agents operate in a highly constrained environment. Despite significant research, existing solutions are limited in their ability to handle heterogeneous constraints within highly dynamic or uncertain environments. This paper presents a novel maneuver selection technique suited for both 2D and 3D environments with highly dynamic maneuvering constraints and multiple mobile obstacles. Agents may have any arbitrary set of nonholonomic control variables; maneuvers can be constrained by a broad class of function inequalities, including time-dependent constraints involving nonlinear relationships between controlled and agent-state variables. The resulting algorithm has been implemented to run in real time using only a fraction of the CPU's capacity on an ordinary notebook computer and performs well in a number of taxing simulated situations.

The increased importance of graphics in computer systems has made computer graphics a more visible and important part of computer science education. This graphics education can take any of several forms. This panel describes four of these: the graphics service course for non-majors, the graphics systems course, the graphics concepts and algorithms course, and advanced or graduate courses in graphics. This panel is based on part of a workshop presented at SIGGRAPH '87.

In March of 1979, the Curriculum Committee on Computer Science (C3 S) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) proposed recommendations for the undergraduate curriculum in computer science: “Curriculum '78.” “Curriculum '78” includes CS 5, “Introduction to File Processing,” as an undergraduate core requirement. Seven years after “Curriculum '78,” findings show that more than 70% of universities offering undergraduate degrees in computer science do not require a course similar to CS 5. The controversial role of CS 5 in the undergraduate computer science curriculum id discussed.

An object-space hidden-line algorithm for higher-dimensional scenes has been designed and implemented. Scenes consist of convex hulls of any dimension, each of which is compared against the edges of all convex hulls not eliminated by a hyperdimensional clipper, a depth test after sorting and a minimax text. Hidden and visible elements are determined in accordance with the dimensionality of the selected viewing hyperspace. When shape alone is the attribute of interest, hidden-line elimination need be performed only in that hyperspace. The algorithm is of value in the production of shadows of hyperdimensional models, including but not limited to four-dimensional space-time models, the hyperdimensional elementary catastrophe models and multivariate statistical models.