Fall
2005 Final Exam
This final exam
is a 'take home' exam. You are expected to work on it completely by
yourself. It is due at 3:00pm on 12/12/07. By that time you should have
set up a web page with your solution, and emailed the location of that
web page to Andy. During the scheduled final exam time we will meet in
class and you will have 6 minutes to briefly describe your solution to
the class. We wont have time for a question / answer period; this way
we can get through everyone within two hours. Any published books,
papers, videos, or web-based materials may be consoluted. This final is
designed to have you think about all of the things we have talked
about, read about, and worked on in class to solve a problem. The
problem is this:
You are
approached by the curator of the LearnALot Museum who wants to use
virtual reality as part of a new exhibit. She would like you to make a
proposal to show how this would work. We will assume that the available
hardware is basically the same as the C-Wall in the classroom, except
that the tracking always works, so you have the single pair of tracked
passive glasses, the wand, the extra two sensors, the extra passive
glasses, and the sound system. You will have four meters / yards in
front of the screen that will be open space. You can assume you will
have the same tools available to create the virtual world, but a longer
timeframe (say 6 months, and a crew of 4 people.)
You will design
an immersive environment to help museum patrons learn about an
historical or pre-historical period. The historical event/period that
you choose should be at least be 30 years old, and preferably a lot
older than that. Your exhibit should be historically accurate, based on
current generally accepted scientific and historical records, and you
should be able to cite scientific or historical references for your
work.
The environment
should be educational - that is, the user should learn something from
the experience, and the experience itself should obviously benefit from
being experienced in VR. The environment should be designed to fit
within a museum setting and give the user a 15 minute experience. It
should be entertaining. It should be highly interactive. Do not forget
the importance of audio. You can assume that the museum will have
someone standing by the display to help people with the equipment, but
your application should help the user understand how to use the
application quickly.
You should
assume that visitors will be in small groups of 3 to 5 people. The
visitors will be of various ages but you can target your application to
teenagers and adults. Think about spoken / written language issues -
all of the museum patrons may not speak the same first language.
You should
describe the experience of the users in detail with regards to the
visuals and the sounds, and especially in terms of interaction.
Drawings, diagrams, and storyboards will be very useful here.
Your write-up
should be well thought out and organized ... in English please, so I
don't need to use altavista's babelfish to translate your answer. You
get a week to do this, so it should not be a stream of consciousness
answer. I would suggest thinking about it for a while first, then chose
a topic that interests you or a topic that you know something about.
Confirm the topic via email with Andy. Make some sketches, write some
notes, then organize them. Do a first draft, let it sit for a day or
two, then come back and read it critically looking for holes that you
need to fill. The various second projects that were presented are good
models in terms of the length of the experience and the complexity of
the world that you should be thinking of.
One common
question is how long should this be, and that’s a hard one to answer.
You are not graded on quantity. You are graded on quality and
comprehensiveness but also succinctness. Quality vs Quantity looks like
a bell curve in this case. I would think something about the size of a
typical research paper would be about right, including images.
Organization is very important. Make sure you have labelled sections.
During your 6
minute presentation to the class you should briefly describe the
historical environment that you want to immerse the user in, what the
environment will consist of, what the user will do in that environment,
and why you believe immersive VR will be beneficial here.
last
revision 12/2/07