Introduction to Alice Alice is named in honor of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland

How This Class Will Work General plan lecture/demonstrations tutorials lab exercises Out-of-class: complete any work not finished in lab work on assigned readings and projects

Overview Why Alice? Getting Started with Alice Where to find software and 3D models Major goal: set up and run Alice Animations in Alice Classes and Objects in Alice Objects have parts

How To Get Your Free Copy Can download from the web Note: downloading may take more than an hour over a phone/modem connection

Why Alice? A modern programming tool 3-D graphics 3-D models of objects Animation Objects can be made to move around the virtual world (a video game or simulation implemented in 3-D)

What does Alice run on? Alice is written in Java -- this helps the software run on many popular systems Right now, the software team is working to support only the PC version Mac and Linux versions are soon to be released …keep checking the web site

Fast Start Up Can quickly learn to create a simple animation in a matter of minutes a non-trivial animation in a few lab sessions Can learn to use the Alice interface in a couple of lab sessions

The Power of Alice Automatically keeps track of 3-D objects what objects are in the virtual world types of objects positions of objects in the world

Demo Starting Alice Running A World How to Exit What to do if Alice crashes

Memory Management Alice automatically manages memory But, writing and testing an animation is an intense load on the computing system – a crash can occur. Best solution: save your world every 15 minutes (Or at least every half hour) also save to a backup system (for example, a zip disk)

Kinds of Animations The animation just viewed was a "movie" Two kinds of animations: Movie user watches the animation "machine-centric" Interactive user clicks on mouse, types a key on keyboard … "user-centric"

Events Animations that are interactive depend on the user's actions mouse click key press others (HeadMountedDevice, etc.) Actions are events Interactive programs are event-driven

Interactivity in Alice Demo of interactive program in Alice What are the events? What response does the skater make to each event?

Objects In the demo worlds, the octopus and skater are objects. An "object" is anything that can be identified as unique from other things How is an object identified as unique? has a name has properties: width, height, color, location, age, ss#, id# has a purpose: associated actions it can perform tasks it can carry out

Class Objects are categorized into classes Each object is an instance of the class. All objects in a class have similar properties and generally can perform the same tasks. Person Dogs Peter Mary Paul Spike Scottie Fluffy

Objects in a Virtual World In Alice, each 3D model is a class of objects each object of the class has a unique name mummy, mummy1, mummy2 has color(s) pink, white, grey, black, blue, ….

Galleries of 3D Objects Sources of 3D objects the local gallery shipped with the software Alice web gallery

Object Parts Objects may be composed of parts

3D objects A 3D object has 3 dimensions height, width, depth 6 degrees of freedom (directions of movement)

Center At the center of mass Where it stands on the ground Where it is held

Assignment Your assignment is to read Tutorial1 Load ALICE on your home computer The reading assignment is to be completed before the next class session

Elements of Visual Programming Introduction to Alice22 Starting Tutorials

Lab00 Tutorial1 Exercises00 Notes: Lab exercises and projects require that you demonstrate the code and execution of your programs to the instructor Your lab sheet must have the signature of the instructor. Otherwise, you will not get credit for having completed the lab!