Software for satellite graphics systems

This paper has four purposes. Each is addressed in one of the four following sections. In section 2 the motivations for satellite graphics are briefly summarized. Section 3 briefly reviews the past and current technological developments which have made satellite graphics possible. Having set the stage with these two reviews, in section 4 various interactive graphics programming systems which use satellites are presented, evaluated, and found lacking. The basic theme of the section is that hardware technology has outpaced software technology. The fifth section describes several projected improvements to software technology which will substantially narrow or eliminate the hardware-software gap