USER-FRIENDLY GRAPHICS GENERATOR USING DIRECT MANIPULATION

摘要

A 3D graphics generation and display application for PCs and laptops in a business environment includes an authoring mode screen which has a list (38) database elements sought to be graphically displayed, along with a list (40) of variables pertaining to the database elements. Also, the application presents a menu (42) of graphics attributes, including each of the three spatial dimensions and time, as well as various graphics object attributes, such as color, size, rotation, opacity, intensity, texture, etc. The user determines whether the graphics objects are balls for a scatter plot, bars for a bar chart, pie-shaped elements for a pie chart, or other 3D representation. By clicking on a database variable in the list (40) of variables and dragging it over an attribute on the attribute menu (42), the user can correlate the database variable with the graphics attribute. When the user correlates a variable to a graphics attribute, the correlation is noted by a legend (44) that is displayed with the menu (42) of attributes. The graphics are displayed in an animated 3D presentation with graphics attributes, including their motion over time, determined by the database variables which have been correlated to the attributes.