Web-Based Interactive 3D Visualization for Computer Graphics Education

Instead of web-based course development using an off-the-shelf web authoring tool, we believe that a better way to show principles and techniques in computer science is to have the related algorithms running "live" in background and to allow students interact with them within a web browser. We have chosen computer graphics as an example course because of its demand for visualization and its challenge for 3D rendering. This paper presents the visualization techniques and a set of web-based demos designed to demonstrate the computer graphics concepts and OpenGL functions. We have ported the popular Nate Robins' OpenGL demos on the web and have also developed our own demos. The main idea of the approach is to put a real world scene and a rendering result side by side together with a set of corresponding OpenGL functions to produce the rendering result from the real-world scene. Animation, user interaction, manipulation, and virtual navigation are supported in the sense that functions and the parameters of each function can be changed interactively and such changes will be reflected immediately in the rendering result. The demos are written by using Java and GL4Java, an OpenGL Java binding to ensure the deployment on the Web. The result is a set of interactive web-based tutorials with rich visualization driven by underlying algorithms to demonstrate the subject principles and techniques. Although the contents of the demos are specific to computer graphics, the presented methodology represents a generic approach which is discipline/course independent and can be applied to various other computer science courses.