Dynamic Exploration of Value Configurations: Interrelating traditional cultural symbols through animation

Interrelating traditional cultural symbols through animation

Operation of web browsers and plugins:

• Adobe Systems provides an SVG Viewer (for which support is to be discontinued in January 2009) and has a plugin test page to determine whether it has been correctly installed.
• Internet Explorer (as of 2008) requires a plugin although IE 6.x comes with the Adobe SVG Viewer plugin pre-installed (that is reportedly more tolerant of SVG errors). The Adobe plugin can be installed via the plugin test page. Use the test page if there is any doubt whether a working plugin has already been installed
• Mozilla (as of 2008) requires a plugin (but seems to be more difficult to render operational; see status; a particular issue seems to be appropriate use of the namespace definition to enable animations). Consequently, at best, the "animations" below show as a partial STATIC display, but NOT as animations.
• Opera (9.6 beta) does handle part of the animation but either jerks across the screen and/or ignores others phases of the animation; the Opera community does have an active interest in SVG
• It seems that some browsers (like Google's Chrome) may partially render the STATIC parts of the animation.

Conclusion:

• Use Internet Explorer for the moment. Any feedback on other versions (Mac, etc) would be appreciated.
• As indicated in Table 1 above, in an effort to produce a Flash (SWF) variant, some later animation experiments (Group C) have been produced using SVG supplemented by Javascript. These variants work with IE6 or IE7 and the Adobe plugin, or with Mozilla without that SVG plugin. They also work with Google's Chrome and Opera. (This adapation was achieved thanks to Gildas Trébaol).

It should be noted that some of the most recent animations listed have web links associated with the text labels displayed. For whatever technical reason, these do not bring up the relevant documents in some animations. Similar difficulties were experienced in incorporating mouseover features. These text labels added successively during the animation cycle provide hyperlinks to pages commenting on each in metaphorical terms from a Policy perspective -- from each such page access is also possible to analogous pages from a Dialogue, Vision, Conference, Network, Community, or Lifestyle perspective (an overview of this array of links to 448 such pages is available with relevant commentaries). The hyperlinks from the animation work in Mozilla, Opera and Chrome but not in IE. (This adapation was achieved thanks to Gildas Trébaol).

Development: Given that the original animation (Group A in Table 1) was generated by program in Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) format, the challenge has been to convert it into the Shockwave Flash (SWF) format. This is currently the dominant format for displaying animated vector graphics on the web. Plugins to play SWF files in web browsers are available from Adobe for most desktop operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac, and Linux.

The software for doing so is currently in beta development by Gildas Trébaol (How to translate SVG documents for viewing them with any Flash player) who provides useful comments on the merits of the SVG to SWF route. His conversion of the SVG to SWF (with some simplifications) can be viewed via IE, Opera and Chrome and in Mozilla (if script blockers are in effect). Otherwise it may be viewed by any Flash player. An extensive comment on this development is available (Gildas Trébaol, I Ching wheel in SVG and Flash format, 2008). This provides useful insights into the relationship of the hexagram structure to the binary coding of such importance to computers.

The software for this conversion is currently in beta development by Gildas Trébaol who provides useful comments on the merits of the SVG to SWF route (How to translate SVG documents for viewing them with any Flash player). He rewrote the SVG generation of the animation in C with Javascript (enabling the Group B versions in Table 1) to ensure the successful conversion of the SVG to SWF, as indicated in his extensive comment (Gildas Trébaol, I Ching wheel in SVG and Flash format, 2008, from which access to the animation is also available). He notably took advantage of the binary structure of the circle of hexagrams, as he explains, to generate the circle of hexagrams rather than using a bitmap as in the earlier experiments -- circumventing a bug in the Mozilla browser that prevented its display of the SVG animations. The rewritten animation is, at this stage, somewhat simpler than the final version by the earlier route, notably excluding the phase whereby the Star of David hexagram "engenders" the I Ching hexagram and the pairing of the "compass" symbol. But the hexagram representation and movement is more appropriate. However this later version is much more compact, efficient and faster in its use of computer resources, as he describes.

The programming solutions in the initial SVG experiments are definitely not the most efficient and represent a compromise in order to get a workable animation in the absence of the greater expertise that would have rendered them of higher quality, possibly with better effects and greater scope for user interaction. Many such improvements have already been made through the process developed by Gildas Trébaol. The main purpose has been low cost "proof of concept" to obtain a sense of the value of the result.

Design improvements: Some additional features explored were omitted because of difficulties with the program, ambiguities regarding the current status of the SVG format and viewer capacities, or the processing demands for smooth rendering on average computers. Some options could only be implemented in separate animations rather than in a single one.

Of particular importance are the aesthetic choices made, especially given the difficulty for the user to modify those choices. For this reason the examples are distinct SVG files rather than a single file offering user control.

An important consideration has been the timing of the animation, given that some may prefer a slower animation -- whereas others may prefer a faster one. Related to this issue are some technical constraints on the transition from one image to another, where the desirable timing of a smooth transition is undermined by computer processor time in relation to the cumbersome programming solution chosen.

Better solutions may emerge to some of these issues, especially since the code can be freely accessed (and changed as a text file). Indeed, with a minimum of competence in SVG, the timing and other properties may be easily modified. Appropriate sound effects may also be added. The approach taken by Gildas Trébaol creates a platform for many such explorations. It should be noted that whereas the SVG animations of Group A can be downloaded for modification by users from this site, download possibilities for the later SVG and SWF versions, and the programs by which they are generated, are only available from the site of Gildas Trébaol (as he describes).

In summary, future design improvements, might include user choice of: hexagram sequence of movement (clockwise, anti-clockwise, or random), rate/pace, colour of various features, omission/inclusion of various features (text, emergent symbols, Chinese ideograms), inversion of reading of hexagrams in circle (out=top or in=top), inclusion/exclusion of sound. Also of interest is the possibility of substituting a different set of text labels as explored above in a later experiment (Adaptation of the binary coding template to the configuration of conventional values and strategies).

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