CS 528 Old Projects

These are the projects that people worked on in previous iterations of the course.

Project 1 focuses on the creation of a simple immersive environment to give everyone some experience with the software toolkits. This project will be done individually.

One of the most common 'hello world' VR applications is the VR museum. While this is typically not a particularly good use of VR in the real world, it does provide a nice testbed to try to create your first world. So, your task is to create a small VR museum. This museum should have one or more rooms with 'artwork' on the walls and 'sculptures' in the middle of the room(s) that you can walk around. This museum could be old tech, current tech or future tech in terms of what the displays look like and how they function. That is, maybe its a typical 'low tech' museum with paintings hanging on the walls and sculptures sitting on pedestals and guides walking around. Or maybe it has holographic generators and android guides. The architecture itself does not have to be physically constructable. It could have 'active' sculpture like fountains or mobiles.

You should have some way for the patrons to get information about the exhibits. Since text is rather hard to read in VR, this is a good place to make use of audio. You could have areas that describe the piece when the user gets close, or you could have people as museum dosuns who explain the piece when the user gets close.

The Museum could be layed out in normal human scale, or perhaps the items are much larger or smaller than human scale. Perhaps the person is walking through the space or maybe its an underwater museum. Interesting lighting is something you can play with. Maybe the rooms have very detailed lighting that you burn as textures onto the surfaces. Maybe the rooms are completely black and you have a flashlight. Make sure people can easily and sucessfully navigate through the space.

What are the exhibits? That's up to you. Preferably there should be a theme linking all the exhibits, but it could just as easily be sugar coated breakfast cereals as Impressionism. It should be something where VR is at least helpful to understand the sculptures. You can use models you find on the web (as long as they are properly cited) but you will get more credit for creating your own rooms and models. Creativity and imagination are very good things ... but you may want to run your incredibly creative and imaginative idea past Andy before you progress too far just to make sure its a good creative and imaginative idea.

To get a passing grade you need to create one low-detail square room with artwork on the 4 walls and a static sculpture in the middle that you can walk around with stereo visuals and head tracking will get you a D. More rooms or more detailed rooms or better looking rooms, or more interesting artwork will improve your grade to a C. More connected rooms are better than one, but each room should be unique - not just more of the same. It is definitely possible to get an A with only a single well developed room. In order to get a B you will need to have interaction - allowing the user to do more than walk around the space(s) ... the user should be able to dynamically interact with the pieces of artwork, or move the artwork around, or improve/destroy the artwork. Getting an A requires the creativity and imagination discussed earlier.

There are a bunch of different possible langauges to use to create this project. Last year the two most popular were Blitz3D (http://www.blitzbasic.com/) and YG (http://www.evl.uic.edu/yg/). This year another good possibility is Electro (http://www.evl.uic.edu/rlk/electro/electro.html). You can also use OpenGL or Java 3D or VR Juggler or Coin3D or Open SceneGraph etc if you want, as long as you clear it first with Andy. The resulting application must be interactive, have stereo visuals, and do position/orientation tracking (head, object, etc). You also must be able to demostrate it in EVL, and you can bring your own hardware along if you wish (HMDs, gloves, different trackers) to do so, or use our sgi-based CAVE or our linux/windows-based C-Wall. Each languages has advantages and disadvantages depending on what you want to do. Blitz3D is good for making realistic looking scenes and is windows specific; YG is good at user interaction and is better on linux than windows. Electro is good for dealing with high-resolution tile displays and runs on multiple platforms.

Project 2 focuses on the creation of a immersive environment as a historical or pre-historical reconstruction. That is you could do a reconstruction of a historical site where human beings once lived, or an exhibit on pre-historic creatures such as dinosaurs, or an exhibit about the conditions on the early Earth. The historical reconstruction should also 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. As a caveat, you could also create an exhibit on previous scientific theories that have been proven wrong, since those previous incorrect theories are still historical.

This project can either be done as individuals or in groups of two or three. Groups of two or three are responsible for CLEARLY delineating each persons role in the project. Groups of n people are expected to do n times as much work as a group of one.

You have the same development langauge choices for this project as in project 1. If you are motivated you can also work in OpenGL, Coin3D, VR Juggler, Open SceneGraph, java3D, etc if you want, as long as you clear it first with Andy. The resulting application must be interactive, have stereo visuals, and do position/orientation tracking (head, object, etc). You also must be able to demostrate it in EVL on one of the C-walls or in the CAVE, or on the varrier, and you can bring your own hardware along if you wish (HMDs, gloves, different trackers) if you prefer to use that hardware.

The environment should be educational - that is, the user should learn something from the experience, and the experience itslef should obviously benefit from being experienced in VR. The environment should be designed to fit within a museum setting and give the user(s) a 15 minute experience. It should be highly interactive. You can assume that the museum will have someone standing by the display to help people with the equipment, but you should provide an easy way to reset the application from the beginning.

The environment could be multi-user with different patrons at different displays sharing the same space, or having different roles in the same space. You may also want to consider linking in other devices such as a pocket PC for displaying other visual or audio information. You can assume that the museum will have someone standing by the display to help people with the equipment, but you should provide an easy way to reset the application from the beginning.

You should describe how the VR display or displays fit into the museum setting. That is, what does the overall room look like? Are there other physical displays of artifacts, or videos playing that share space with the VR display? How are you going to control the lighting and the sound? Remember that you need to think about the flow of people through the exhibit. If you haven't been to a museum in a while then your group may want to take a visit to the Museum of Natural History or the Museum of Science and Industry and get a sense of how these kinds of spaces are layed out. Most museums in the Chicago area have student discounts, and one free day per month.

The work you did on project 1 should be a guide on how NOT to do project 2. The goal here is not to recreate a museum, but to create a VR exhibit that would fit within a museum setting.

Frazini, Gambi Life in the Middle Ages
Liang Ancient China
Khokhlov World War n
Moscatelli Ancient Egypt	-
Ghidoni Ships of Exploration	-
Vroustouris, Subramanian Medieval Castle	-
Chen, Sun, Rabindran Cricket Museum
Ghezzi, D'Ercole, Marella Last Days of Pompei
Bernasconi, Beretta Roman Encampment
Mottola, Stragapede Ancient Greece	-

Bell Downside Up CAVE / world toolkit
Lee Bouncing Space C-Wall / YG
Fossati, Citterio, Pioltelli Neverland C-Wall / Blitz3d
Jagodic, Thompson Police Training CAVE / YG
Jeong VR Golf CAVE / YG
Garofano, Freddi VR Dungeon C-Wall / Blitz3d
Kooima, Rao Scooter the Surfing Shooter C-Wall / Blitz3d
Svistyulya, Olmstead, Klinko Breakout VR C-Wall / Blitz3d
Cordone Undersea Adventure CAVE / YG	-

Lance Dragonfire
Shalini Virtual Inhabitants
Manjunath Virtual Archery	-
Omprakash Virtual City	-
Lawrence Life Objects
Javier, Brenda Jedi Training
Atul SCUBA-dude
Janet Virtual Theremin

Ben	Core Limbo II development
Mike	Collaborative menu sytsem
Ark	-
Sateesh	-
Xiao	VRML world
Nikita	-
Svetlana	VRML fairy tale
Chris	Interaction framework for Limbo II
Alex	-
Zhongwei	Annotation system
Sowmitri	Recording and playback of virtual experiences
Naveen	Virtual Campus Tour: Using VRM

Zarit	-
Imai	-
Insley	-
Hayakawa	-
Wang	Correspondense algorithm for creating intermediate views from 2 given views of a person in the CAVE
Cui	-
Orrego	-
Kapoor	-
Kalra	3D Julia Sets
Demsetz	-
Jefferson	-
Trolio	Wave Transmission and Propagation Simulation