instructor: Andrei Jalba (MF 4.063, aDOTcDOTjalbaATtueDOTnl)

Remarks

1. In the column "day", bold font is used to indicate meeting days; participation is mandatory.

2. Deliverables are handed in via Peach, so it is essential to enroll and be part of a group in Peach.

3. Feedback on the concept report will be given either in/after the presentation + demo day, or via Peach.

This project is aimed at improving the practical skills in creating computer graphics and visualization applications. Programming language and environment are at the choice of the student.

Procedure:

1. Students work in groups of two (or three) persons and register as such in Oase.
   In case of a small number of participants, this may be reduced to groups of one person.
2. Each group chooses one of the assignments given below. Only up to two groups are allowed to work on the same assignment. To avoid conflicts, make two or even three choices for interesting assignments, from those given below. The final assignment choice is finalized during the first meeting above.
3. Each group writes a proposal for the assignment.
   The proposal should contain:
   • global description of the system,
   • specification of functionality, interaction, and presentation
   • a planning
   The total size of this proposal should be 4 to 6 pages.

   The proposal (as well as all other reports, see below) should be handed-in via Peach and it should be in pdf format. If Peach does not allow you to upload the pdf file, enclose it in a zip archive before uploading it. The instructor will provide feedback about your proposal via Peach. Typically, responses are suggestions for addition or removal of functionality or changes in planning.

4. The students start working on their assignments and can consult the instructor after making an appointment.
5. Submission I: concept version of the final report, featuring sections and subsections with an appropriate description of the intended content, or the actual content where that is possible.
6. Presentation day I/II: each group gives a short, 7-10 minute, presentation about the project and shows a running prototype illustrating the already implemented concepts. Clearly explain requirements, state problems and their solutions, as far as feasible. Care must be taken to state clearly the status of the project: what is already finished, what still needs to be done, etc.
   
7. Submission II: a complete report has to be submitted; see report requirements below. The supervisor will review this report and notify the students of his findings.
8. Demo day: Students present their results to fellow students and to a selection of staff members of the visualization group.
9. Submission III: final deliverables, including the final report. Students should also send a separate report stating the changes wrt submission II. This change report should not only state what has been changed in the report but also clearly state what the students did as a result of the review they received before. See below for more remarks on deliverables.

• report and change report.
• working program + sources + manual + snapshots to be supplied via Peach.
  It should be possible to easily test the program so good sample input is also required, if applicable.

The report should contain the following elements.

• introduction/requirements
• analysis and solution: mathematics/algorithms/system design
• motivation of choices made,
• discussion of literature,
• results & evaluation, explicitly mentioning of known limitations
• conclusion and future work

⊕ Braitenberg vehicles
Build an interactive educational virtual environments in which Braitenberg vehicles may live and do their thing. The educational part of this assignment should be that with interaction with the vehicles and environment, the working of the Braitenberg vehicles can be clearly illustrated. Furthermore, the end result should show superb 3D-modelling, rendering and interaction.

Additional information

• Braitenberg vehicle on wikipedia
• video 1
• video 2

⊕ Interactive display method for digital photographs
Build an interactive environment for displaying collections of photographs, using different arrangements. Various requirements for photo arrangements should be flexibly replaced or added through the interaction and the results should be dynamically displayed.

Additional information

• Dynamic and Flexible Interactive PhotoShow

⊕ Ant colony optimization for path planning
In the natural world, ants initially wander randomly, and upon finding food return to their colony while laying down pheromone trails. If other ants find such a path, they do not keep traveling at random, but instead follow the trail, returning and reinforcing it if they eventually find food. The idea of the ant-colony algorithm is to mimic this behavior with "simulated ants" walking around the graph representing the problem to solve.

Build an interactive simulation environment based on the ant-colony algorithm applied to path planning for e.g. robot navigation. Given an input environment (e.g. a building floor, a map of buildings within a city, a floor/maze plan, etc.) and certain goal/target positions (e.g. exit locations), your simulator should use the ant-colony algorithm to compute "optimal paths" towards the goals. Your simulator should allow the visualization of the "ants", algorithm state, progress, etc. and allow interactive manipulation of the goal positions.

Additional information

• Dynamic and Flexible Interactive PhotoShow

⊕ House of cards clip
For the song 'house of cards' of the band Radiohead a 3D point cloud was generated (see links below). Create a clip for this song given this data. The emphasis of this assignment should be on manipulation of point clouds: e.g. surface reconstruction, shading, denoising, etcetera.

• The making of radio head's house of cards (dead?)
• link (alternative)
• interactive clip (alternative)

⊕ procedural city modelling

Creation of environments for games is a laborious task. A way to simplify this task is by automatic generation of environments using parameterized procedures. For this assignment you are asked to, fully automatically and in a higly parameterizable way, generate a large city plan and fill that in with buildings, parks, bridges, traffic signs, etcetera. To increase level of realism and at the same time reduce the size of the model the generation of textures is highly advisable. Some additional requirements for this assignment could be: on demand city generation, walkthrough animation, height map/landscape generation, high level parameterization (Roman buildings, Chinese town, Gaudi style, ...). Proposals that make good use of a city map, and other real data, statistics, or maps are preferred. Additional information: openeindhoven.nl buurtmonitor

⊕ hair simulation
See here.

⊕ position-based fluid simulation
See here.

⊕ object/shape recognition from silhouettes
See here.

⊕ virtual creatures
See here.