Much of
the intro material is covered in my CS 428 notes, so I am going
to do a quick overview of those in the next couple weeks
Create an image (jpg,
png, pdf) with a photo of yourself, your name, and your
interests related to this course
Next time at the beginning of class everyone will connect to the
classroom wall, drag and drop their image onto the screen and
give a brief 1 minute introduction so we can get to know each
other a little bit.
so, for example I could show something like this:
We will all be using
our SAGE software regularly in the class so be sure to bring
your laptop with you to class each day and download the SAGE3
client for your laptop before the next class from http://sage3.sagecommons.org/
The SAGE3 link for the board on
the front wall is
sage3://sage3alpha.evl.uic.edu/#/enter/e9e7c9a5-9685-440e-8318-fda4c96eaede/15d6742e-c6b4-44eb-b5ab-59f4a46ed95e
Tools
For interacting with the CAVE2
display during our discussions we will be using SAGE3
For creating the VR worlds for the class we will be using
Unity3D
Unity3D runs
on windows and OS-X so you can do much of your development on a
laptop and then move over to a machine connected to a VR display
for testing. I highly suggest
that you test on the actual hardware regularly so
you don't go too far down a development path that won't work for
the final deployment. In the main lab we have CAVE2. We have a
tracked 3D wall in the classroom. There are also a few Quest 1s
around.
With Unity you
will be using a combination of an IDE and writing C# code, so
its a good idea to go through the introductory tutorials if you
haven't used Unity before (e.g. in the CS Video Game course,
Creative Coding, or the 400 level VR course).
The tutorials at https://unity3d.com/learn are a good place to start learning the Unity3D IDE.
While most of the VR project work in this class will be done through coding, there are a variety of tools that can be used to create models, sounds, textures, etc. Here you are free to use the tools of your choice. The following are pretty decent free ones.
We will be using GitHub for turning in the projects - https://github.com/
You should create a repository for each project.
Some Tutorials - https://git-scm.com/book/en/v1/Getting-Started-Git-Basics
Quick Command List - https://rogerdudler.github.io/git-guide/
GitHub and Unity - https://thoughtbot.com/blog/how-to-git-with-unity
At minimum you will be using git to turn in your code, but I would also recommend regularly updating your code on git so there is some external proof of when you submitted, as well as having backup copies at various checkpoints. Note that git can also be a nice place to store a copy of your website files to prove they were done on time, and you can host your website for your project on git as well if you prefer. Note that I would not rely solely on Git for backing up your projects - keep multiple backups in multiple places.
Another place to host a website
is google sites. Another is people.uic.edu (https://people.uic.edu/). You
can use UIC's vpn (http://accc.uic.edu/service/vpn) along
with 2 factor authentication (https://accc.uic.edu/tag/anyconnect)
to mount this directory on your personal computer for ease of
moving files around (smb://<yourID>.people.uic.edu/). You
can use any other hosting service you wish, but these pages must
be publicly viewable by everyone in the class at least until the
end of the course. You can use any publicly available templates
as long as you cite them, or create your own.
Overview of VR