[fluxus] under the shade of abstraction

[nik gaffney]

potentially interesting, possibly diversionary... .
 http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/mspk-abstract-shade-trees/

abstract: 

As GPU-powered special effects become more sophisticated, it becomes harder to
create and manage effect interaction using the fairly primitive shading
languages. This difficulty also introduces a workflow problem: artists design
effects but only programmers can implement them, making it impossible for them
to work asynchronously.

To address these problems we present abstract shade trees and heuristic
algorithms that operate over them. The trees allow designers to easily create
effects by connecting primitives such as cube mapping and modulation. These
primitives publish semantically rich types that encapsulate notions like vector
basis and normalization. The algorithms employ these published types to
automatically infer atomic and compound connectors between the primitives, and
generate code for the tree. We also describe a visual editing environment for
specifying the trees.

Our data structure and algorithms spare designers from having to specify
low-level programming details, enabling them to experiment without depending on
programmers. The algorithms ensure that the generated code will be free of
type-mismatches, a problem in previous shade trees. The abstract shade tree can
also naturally express high-level features like shadows and reflections whose
implementations overlap; that cross-cutting has made them difficult to
modularize in more traditional ways. In experiments, the generated shaders are
as efficient as handwritten code.