Hello all,
We are a team of lost-media researchers looking for a specific piece of software called "VPLA" (Visual Programming Language for Animation). This piece of software was used at the Cornell Theory Center to visualize scientific animations. It was made available on their public FTP server for anyone to download.
Despite our efforts to contact some of the original authors, we have been unable to locate a copy of this software. We are reaching out to this community in the hope that someone may have information about where we could find VPLA or if there are any alternative means of accessing it.
Here's a link to the archived webpage: https://web.archive.org/web/20000816061843im_/http://www.tc.cornell.edu/Visualization/Software/VPLA/
For those unfamiliar with VPLA, it extends the traditional scene description from a tree of transformations, objects, rendering properties, lights, and cameras to a visually specified structured program with constructs like conditionals, iteration, and recursive procedures. It also supports various parameterized nodes such as modeling operators, constructive solid geometry operators, nonlinear deformations, particle systems, and user-defined nodes.
VPLA's drag-and-drop network editor provides an intuitive visual programming language for combined scene modeling and motion choreography. Its advantages include an editable visual representation of complex scene hierarchies, powerful shape and motion instancing, a visual record of modeling operations, the availability of programming constructs without the overhead of a compiled language, and extensibility through user-written modules.
If anyone has information about the availability of VPLA or can point us in the right direction, we would be incredibly grateful. Please feel free to reply to this post or contact me directly with any information.
Thank you in advance for your help and consideration.
We are a team of lost-media researchers looking for a specific piece of software called "VPLA" (Visual Programming Language for Animation). This piece of software was used at the Cornell Theory Center to visualize scientific animations. It was made available on their public FTP server for anyone to download.
Despite our efforts to contact some of the original authors, we have been unable to locate a copy of this software. We are reaching out to this community in the hope that someone may have information about where we could find VPLA or if there are any alternative means of accessing it.
Here's a link to the archived webpage: https://web.archive.org/web/20000816061843im_/http://www.tc.cornell.edu/Visualization/Software/VPLA/
For those unfamiliar with VPLA, it extends the traditional scene description from a tree of transformations, objects, rendering properties, lights, and cameras to a visually specified structured program with constructs like conditionals, iteration, and recursive procedures. It also supports various parameterized nodes such as modeling operators, constructive solid geometry operators, nonlinear deformations, particle systems, and user-defined nodes.
VPLA's drag-and-drop network editor provides an intuitive visual programming language for combined scene modeling and motion choreography. Its advantages include an editable visual representation of complex scene hierarchies, powerful shape and motion instancing, a visual record of modeling operations, the availability of programming constructs without the overhead of a compiled language, and extensibility through user-written modules.
If anyone has information about the availability of VPLA or can point us in the right direction, we would be incredibly grateful. Please feel free to reply to this post or contact me directly with any information.
Thank you in advance for your help and consideration.