The real-time, 3D, animation system would have as its major components:
  1. locomotion simulators (e.g., bipedal human, quadripedal horse);
  2. other similar motion simulators (e.g., human arm, robot arm);
  3. a library of static forms (e.g., the human body as a collection of parametric surfaces - geometric modeling);
  4. a geometric modeling based transformation system that takes 1 - 3 as its input and oputputs a new form {geometric model};
  5. a scene composer that selects textures, illumination, viewpoint, etc.;
  6. various interfaces to the HoloCam rendering system.
    The special purpose I/O section might include such devices as:
  1. an acoustic holography unit for direct shape and motion input;
  2. a unit for detecting head position of a viewer - with that information the viewpoint for rendering can be changed so that the viewer can 'look around corners';
  3. a direction of sight unit for tracking where a viewer is looking (picture resolution can be decreased away from where the viewer is looking).

The patch statistics accelerator is a special purpose texture mapper that allows certain of the control variables needed by each texture mapper to be calculated at the rate needed by a real-time system.

The geometric modeling accelerator is a special purpose matrix multiplier.

And the real-time texture mapping rendering system is described elsewhere.