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> ## Introduction

> Animation involves changing media over time or in reaction to user input. Media includes sound, 2-D images, and 3-D objects, along with their corresponding camera and lights, colors, textures, and other visual or audio properties. DirectAnimation™ allows developers to produce sophisticated animation from a relatively small number of classes and methods.

> DirectAnimation supports a broad set of functionality for mixed-media animation, including:

> - Importing images, translating and displaying them with pixel-to-pixel mapping to the screen.
> - Creating 3-D scenes and rendering them with traditional lighting, shading, and camera models.
> - Streaming audio and video from files or the network.
> - Combinations of all of the above.

> With DirectAnimation, you can create a rich interactive animation that draws on both synthetic media (such as 3-D graphics) and recorded media (such as audio and video). For example, you can navigate a 3-D space to inspect a collection of museum items or commercial products. You can implement spatial navigation by using position and orientation to index different items represented as images and video clips.

> There are three basic ways to use DirectAnimation. HTML authors can integrate multimedia using the DirectAnimation controls. The controls can be further enhanced with JScript and/or VBScript. VBScript and JScript writers and Java applet writers can program animations for web pages. Finally, Java, Visual Basic, and C++ application programmers can develop ActiveX Controls or full applications. Thus, DirectAnimation provides a multimedia API and run time that scales from the HTML author to the C++ programmer.

> The basic class in DirectAnimation is called a behavior. Use the DirectAnimation classes and methods to construct time-varying, interactive behaviors. You can join sequences of behaviors to produce complex, flexible animation from just a few operations.

> Behaviors that are rendered for presentation to the user are called media behaviors. These include:

> - 2-D image behaviors (the DAImage class and Java ImageBvr class)
> - 3-D geometry behaviors (the DAGeometry class and Java GeometryBvr class)
> - sound behaviors (the DASound class and Java SoundBvr class)

> Other behaviors control the attributes of the media behaviors, or the way they are rendered to the screen. For example:

> - Color behavior (the DAColor and ColorBvr classes)
> - Camera behavior (the DACamera and CameraBvr classes)
> - Transform behavior (the DATransform2 and DATransform3 classes, and the Java Transform2Bvr and Transform3Bvr classes)

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