How I Created the Lava Lamp

My Lava Lamp is featured in:

TeamJava Java Links

There were at least three steps in creating this animation applet.

• Create the animation frames.
  I was inspired by the wonderful program by Robert Rudd in The Mathematica Journal, Volume 5, Issue 4, Fall 1995. I typed his program into a Mathematica notebook, lava.ma, and ran it to create 36 frames of the lamp animation cells.
• Create the lava.gif files.
  Now I used used Ed Donley's very useful math2html program to convert the Mathematica notebook into a set of files, lava.html and various lava*.gif files, that can be viewed with a Web browser.
• Put the files into a Java(tm) animation program.
  

  This lamp uses the Rotator.class of Wayne Radband of NIH. Wayne describes how he took my .gif files to produce a single small file containing all frames that could be animated. Wayne's comments on how he did this are:

  Here is the updated procedure:

  • Converted the .gifs to a single PICS file using GraphicConverter
  • Opened the PICS file in NIH Image as a stack
  • Cropped the stack using the "Crop and Scale - Fast" macro from the "Stacks" macro file
  • Converted the stack to a single image using the "Make Montage" command
  • Saved the single image in PICT format
  • Converted the image to 4-bits/pixel (16 colors) using Photoshop
  • Opened in GraphicConverter and saved as interlaced GIF

  Here is the applet tag I use for the new, smaller image:

  <applet code="Rotator.class" width=116 height=263> <param name=image value="JavaLamp.gif"> <param name=frames value="36"> <param name=rate value="6"> </applet>

  I found that this exercise to be a nice example of how several programs can be used to create interesting Web page animations. Thanks to the authors of these programs for making them available.

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  Send comments or questions to steve@smc.vnet.net

  
  

  © Copyright 2000 Steven M. Christensen and Associates, Inc.

  Java is a trademark of Sun Microsystems

  This page was last updated on May 21, 2000.