This is a mouse-controlled animation that allows the user to view each frame by dragging the
green spheres either horizontally or vertically.
Since this is an animation of an actual physical device, it was necessary to build a rig that
would allow photos to be taken at a set of specific angles. In this case we chose
to rotate the device at 10 degree increments which gave us 36 animation frame photos for each
rotation in a circle of 360 degrees. An additional requirement is that the device
could spin in either the horizontal or vertical axis in the final animation. The
photos were then imported into Adobe Photoshop to prepare each frame image; this was done
mainly to remove the background containing the rig, but also to line each image up to a
specific point in the frame. When all the frames were prepared, they were imported
into Adobe Flash. 3D animation of virtual objects is obviously much easier, but
the requirement was that it be the actual physical device, and this presented a huge amount of
problems to overcome. Although the project itself was interesting and produced
results, it was not worth the amount of effort expended. We don't recommend trying
this at home. Also, three more animations of similar devices of different sizes
were also produced, but those animations are not shown here.