How to Use

Drag with the left mouse button to draw shapes.
Left click on the height pallette to change your current drawing height.
Top the right mouse button to switch between SIRDS and grey-scale height mode.

Also by default shapes drawn with a lower height will appear behind higher shapes (just like in a Z-buffer) you can turn this off (or back on) by taking the middle mouse button.

About

First of all I know this app is a little rough, I wrote it mostly as a proof of concept that you can apply the SIRDS algorithum (or at least the AbSIRD approximation of that algorithum) in real-time in Java. This applet is based on my previous PDAbSIRD which is a more complete SIRDS drawing tool available for the Pocket PC (it was written in C using Win32 to give better performance). But it is also for all of you out there who love Magic-Eye books and posters and like to see them in all kinds of interesting places like on the web. What I'm hoping is that having this applet available and putting out the source code will encourage others out there to write some interesting games that use SIRDS. To help support this idea I have also written SPonglet which is a simple Pong game using the same SIRDS code as AbSIRDlet.

I also have a few other SIRDS applications on my AbSIRD homepage (this includes a Quake 2 mod allowing you to play the whole game in SIRDS). On that page you can also find an essay on the AbSIRD algorithumn and even a demo of how it can be implimented using pixel shaders.

If there is someone out there who would like to take the time to clean up this demo and make it a more complete drawing tool I would love to see it done and would be glad to help in any way I can.

Download

This is the builds and source code for both AbSIRDlet and SPonglet. Please note that ZDraw.java is shared between the two applets. Also keep in mind that this source code was a quick proof-of-concept hack so don't consider it for lessons on how to write good code. I only put it here to help others in writing their own SIRDS implimentations.

If you have any trouble, questions or comments please feel free to email me at lewey@lewcid.com. Also if you use this code to write your own project I would love to hear about it.