Followers
I took a look at Herbert Stockers’ paper on Follower nodes today. The examples are quite good. The paper is first rate. You can find the paper at the www.bitmanagement.de site.
http://www.bitmanagement.de/documents/Stocker_06_Followers.pdf
For those of you who have yet to read this, Stocker provides a means to create filters that smooth motion of objects such as avatars by nodes that calculate movement in real time. Read the paper to see the math and implementation. With these nodes, for example, an avatar or other object starts and stops in a more natural manner thus simulating inertia. Paths are calcuated to targets such that the object moves in smooth curves without the jerks and sudden stops. If an object is, say picked up and pushed to a wall, it moves there in a smooth motion.
Stocker also gives examples of different nodes that the Followers can route to such as having color followers. He provides protos and externprotos for these and suggests their inclusion in the spec. At the very least, these are a great addition to the BitManagement proto library. At best, they can be incorporated into the browsers.
It would be interesting to apply these filters to nodes for emotion engines to enable behavior smoothing or even to sound nodes to get good ADSR.
Nice work for the cause. Appreciated, Mr Stocker!