More on Project 1


Project 1 focuses on the creation of a simple immersive environment to give everyone some experience with creating a simple virtual world before going on to something more complicated. This project will be done individually and will focus on interaction within a life-size environment.

The world you create should have an interior area (one or two rooms) and an outside area (at least 500 feet by 500 feet or 150 meters by 150 meters ) The interior and exterior areas should have objects (furniture, trees, etc.) The world should be life-size, 1:1 scale. The world should have a theme, though the theme can be up to you. The world should make use of the built-in physics engine, and it should make use of the built-in sound capabilities. The user should be able to interact with the world beyond walking around in it.

The stereotypical environment that meets these needs is the 'cabin in the woods' but that same concept could be a cave on Mars or a sunken ship at the bottom of a lake. It could be in the present, past, or future. Others things (creatures) can also be moving around (swimming, flying, levitating, crawling, etc) within the space.

Its important to make sure people can easily navigate through the space (e.g. are the doorways big enough, is the furniture or trees far enough apart.

All of the models that you use must be created from scratch by you; you can not make use of models that you find on the web. However you can make use of public domain textures and sounds as long as you refence where you got them from. Creating your own textures and sounds is better.

To get a passing grade
To get a B
To get an A

The language that we will be using this year is Electro (http://www.evl.uic.edu/rlk/electro/electro.html).

There are various modelling packages out there with different advocates. Blender has been popular lately (http://www.blender.org/). It has a high learning curve but there are some nice tutorials. I like ac3d myself. You can use any modelling package you want to create your models as long as it can correctly export .obj files for electro to use.

I highly suggest trying to create some simple objects and import them into electro early on. There can be issues in converting between formats so its better to deal with those issues early in development. It is also very important to maintain a high frame-rate, and modellers tend to create models that are too complex, so its also important to get a feel for the appropriate level of complexity early. Test on the C-Wall early.

The C-Wall is being run by a SUSE 10.2 PC with the following hardware:

For turning in the assignment you should create a web page containing a description of what you created and what interesting special things you did. This page should also contain a link to a file containing your well-commented source code and all related models, textures, and sounds.) When you email Andy the link to your web page you should also include a 320x240 screen snapshot of your world to include on the course presentation web page.

Each person will be presenting his/her virtual world to the class at the C-Wall for roughly 10 minutes with an additional 5-10 minutes for questions.
 

last revision 8/28/07