Improving Usability of Interactive Graphics Specification and Implementation with Picking Views and Inverse Transformations

Specifying and programming graphical interactions are difficult tasks, notably because designers have difficulties expressing the dynamics of the interaction. This paper shows how a specific architecture improves the usability of the specification and the implementation of graphical interaction. The architecture is based on the use of picking views and inverse transforms from the graphics to the data. With three examples of graphical interaction, I show how to specify and implement them with the architecture and how this improves programming usability. Moreover, I show that it enables implementing graphical interaction without a scene graph. This kind of code helps prevent errors due to cache consistency management.