The CollageSystem

The CollageSystem is a family of programs for generating pictures and animations using the method of collage grammars developed by the Research Group Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Bremen. Here's a short sketch of collage grammars (PostScript, 1.8m, zipped version, 450k).

CollageVR

This program is written in C++ on Sun SPARCstations with the XView toolkit. It has also been tested on PCs under Linux.

Given a textual description of a collage grammar, it produces three kinds of graphical output:

• an interactive, two-dimensional screen view
• a PostScript output which can be used 'as is' or as a part of a TeX document
• three-dimensional VRML 1.0 (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) output

OpenCollage

OpenCollage is a new development that is based on a new framework called Open* (Open Star). OpenCollage and Open* are written in Java (without any native extensions), so they run on any JDK 1.1 compliant platform.

OpenCollage is already nearly as powerful as CollageVR while being much more flexible. For example, part classes and display mechanims are resolved at run-time, using factory classes and a Model-View-Controller paradigm. You can easily extend the system and plug in own components.

To coin a phrase, Where do you want to go today?

• For a detailed description of CollageVR, jump to the user reference part.
• The theoretical definition of collage grammars and other background information can be found in some related documents.
• If you want to play around with the systems, then the download section is probably what you want.

Thanks for your interest in the CollageSystem. If you have any remarks or questions, please send a mail to the address below .