[suryajena]

This video if it was a scientific paper I would have visualised absolutely nothing. I don't know that if we can submit/embed animations instead of PDFs for university classroom work/ scientific papers, because that's really much better than having to read papers/PDFs that is so incomplete without the right imagination/visualization of the problem. The last time I was giving a mock seminar in my university using a GIF to explain the RRT algorithm I was warned to not use animations in presentations . . . I mean either it was really not that helpful to visualise the solution or it has to do something with age old standards that needs to be revised. I mean figures can only do 3 or 4 frames isn't more frames better.

[jltsiren]

If you need to visualize an algorithm in a talk, the usual approach is having a few slides representing the key steps instead of an actual animation. That way you can adapt the pace to the audience, stop to answer questions about any individual frame, and jump back to previous frames when necessary. People often find animations on slides distracting, and the forced pace is almost certainly wrong. And if the animation is longer than a few seconds, the talk stops being a talk and becomes an awkward video presentation instead.

[klysm]

> People often find animations on slides distracting, and the forced pace is almost certainly wrong.

I completely disagree. Animations can be appropriate, but people have formed dogmatic generalizations due to shitty use of gifs

[dsign]

Careful where you say that :-)

In 2002, when I was doing my second year at college, my professor was cool enough to let me submit an animation of the self-balancing insertion algorithm for AVL trees. Those were the years of Macromedia Flash and Director. It was a cool project, and I wish I had kept the files. Overall, it was a highly technical thing.

Twenty and so years later, I still do animations, even if only as a hobby. These days I use Blender, Houdini, and my own Python scripts and node systems, and my purpose is purely artistic. Something that is as true today as it was twenty years ago is that computer animation remains highly technical. If an artist wants to animate some dude moving around, they will need to understand coordinate systems, rotations, directed acyclic graphs and things like that. Plus a big bunch of specific DCC concepts and idiosyncrasies. The trade is such that one may end up having to implement their own computational geometry algorithms. Those in turn require a good understanding of general data structures and algorithms, and of floating point math and when to upgrade it or ditch it and switch to exact fractions. Topology too becomes a tool for certain needs; for example, one may want to animate the surface of a lake and find out that a mapping from 3D to 2D and back is a very handy tool[^1].

I daresay that creating a Word or even a Latex document with some (or a lot of) formulas remains easier. But if I were the director of a school and a student expressed that videos are easier to understand, I would use it as an excuse to force everybody to learn the computer animation craft.

[^1]: Of course it's also possible to do animations by simply drawing everything by hand in two dimensions, but that requires its own set of skills and talent, and it is extremely labor-intensive. It's also possible to use AI, but getting AI to create a good, coherent and consistent animation is still an open problem.

[formerly_proven]

PDF supports embedded, interactively manipulatable 2D and 3D graphics/objects.

[atoav]

That word "support" does a lot of heavy lifting there. A bit like in "Email supports end to end encryption".

You are not wrong, but if you had to bet your life on somebody being able to get the information and you don't know how they are going to view that PDF would you do it?

[ykonstant]

I've never bothered to look into a TeX based way to do this; is it something that can be done with TikZ/PGF?

[Qwertious]

PDF supports being printed out onto paper.

[szundi]

What if you print it? Your presentation is useless then /s

[yapyap]

1 frame at a time