Abstract Camera Controller for Three-Dimensional Visualizations

In the realm of computer graphics, methods used to control a user's point of view in a three-dimensional world are rather convoluted and are often tightly coupled to the rendering system used. In response to this issue, we have developed a robust camera controller system that provides an intuitive interface for visualization and simulation programmers, while removing renderer dependencies completely. Our system follows common object oriented design principles to encapsulate the complex mathematics and computations involved in synthetic camera manipulation, providing a firm foundation for high-level camera features. We provide a use case where students with no graphics experience developed a visualization system using our camera controller.