Interactive Animation on the Macintosh II

The efficiency of images in communication between humans has so far been used almost exclusively by TV and other mass medias. The costs have been too great to encourage the use of images in the financially restricted everyday practice of architecture. With a range of application programs for the Apple Macintosh II the vision has come close to reality. It is now possible to create guided walks with the chance to choose different routes and views in a model of buildings and surroundings in 256 colour graphics. The makers of these programs may not have foreseen this use for their products and that is why it takes quite a lot of effort to make all the necessary images. With some supplementary routines however, this will be made much easier. Animation can also be used to visualize different processes inside a building. We have been studying the working environment in mechanical industry. The goal of this project is to make communication possible between the workers at all levels of an organization in planning changes and has so far been very successful. The use of this technique is only limited by our imagination and funding. Some examples to be tested in the near future are “Escape at a fire”, “Animation of a Dairy”, “Traffic situations in a parking lot”, “CAD-working place” and others. One of the difficulties in interactive planning with users has been to come close enough to their reality. With animated images it is possible to visualize what is going to happen and what it is going to look like in a more understandable way. In education this must be a challenging possibility. Changes and processes are some of the most difficult subjects to describe and explain! The software used is a handful of individual programs which, thanks to the graphics standards of the Macintosh, can exchange data with each other