Animation on the Web: a survey

Abstract

The main motivation of this paper is to provide a current state and a brief overview of animation on the web. Computer animation is used in many fields and it has seen a lot of development in the recent years. With the widespread use of WebGL and the age of powerful modern hardware available on small devices, 3D rendering on the browser is now becoming commonplace. Computer Animation can be described as the rendering of objects on screen, which can change shape and properties with respect to time. There are many approaches to rendering animation on the web, but none of them yet provide a coherent approach in terms of transmission, compression and handling of the animation data on the client side (browser). And if computer animation has to become more accessible over the web, these challenges need to be addressed in the same “minimalistic manner (requirement wise)” as every other multimedia content has been addressed on the web. We aim to provide an overview of the current state of the art, while commenting on the shortcomings pertaining to current formats/approaches and discuss some of the upcoming standards and trends which can help with the current implementation.