Design of the GRAMS Object-Oriented Graphics System

The field of computer graphics has expanded its influence to practically every other field. Advances in this field have simplified and enhanced areas as diverse as medicine, art, music, architecture, manufacturing, and business. Although great strides have been made in the image generation process, little progress has been made in making graphics systems easy to use. Typical graphics systems today still force the user to interact with the system at a level of abstraction convenient to the machine, rather than a level conveient to the user. By capitalizing on the benefits of the object-oriented paradigm, many of the problems in traditional graphics systems can be overcome. This paper presents GRAMS, the Graphical Application Modeling Support System. GRAMS is an object oriented 3D graphics system designed specifically with the goals of raising the abstraction level at which the user interacts with the system, providing a simple mechanism for extensibility at all system levels, and providing an environment conducive for experimentation with powerful graphics techniques. This provides a system which is easy to use by abstracting the low level details of complex graphics algorithms away from the user. This allows the user to exploit these capabilities without being required to understand their underlying details.