Expert's Voice in Java

This book is divided into three main sections: Java 3D, nonstandard input devices for game playing,and JOGL.Java 3D is a high-level 3D graphics API based around the construction of a scene graph datastructure that contains the objects that appear in the 3D scene. Java 3D topics covered here include how to build your own 3D models, load existing models, create detailed landscapes, display beautiful skies and backgrounds, and have users navigate through the scene, bumping into things as they go.I examine three nonstandard input devices: the webcam, the gamepad, and the P5 data glove—all fun alternatives to the rather boring PC keyboard and mouse.JOGL is a Java wrapper around the popular OpenGL 3D graphics API, which offers a less high-level programming abstraction than Java 3D (in particular, there’s no scene graph to build). JOGL’s closeness to OpenGL means there’s a wealth of existing OpenGL examples, tutorials, and program-[...]ming tips and techniques that can be reused without much recoding. I look at topics similar tothose for Java 3D: landscapes, skyboxes, billboards, picking, fog, overlays, and building and loadingmodels.