Crayoland in new CAVE

22C:196:002, Special Topics in Computer Science

Virtual Environments and Embodied Conversational Agents

Tuesday and Thursday: 2:30pm to 3:45pm         Adler Building E220

Instructor: Sabarish V. Babu, PhD

Office: 101K MacLean Hall, 4pm - 5pm Tuesday/Thursday or by appointment (email)

 

 

 

General Course Information:

This is an introductory course to the technology, software, design, application, and human factor issues in Virtual Environments.  The course will also cover the design and evaluation of Embodied Conversational Agents/Virtual Human Interfaces in interactive Virtual Environments.  The course assumes a general technical background and some type of experience with computer graphics, user interface design, or computer vision.  This course is heavily project oriented.  You will create your own augmented and virtual environments.  The topic can be of your choosing.  If you are unsure if the course is appropriate to your skills you should talk with the instructor, Sabarish V. Babu (sabarish-babu@uiowa.edu).  You can also find the syllabus here. 

Pre-requisites:

22C:021 Computer Science II (Data Structures) or 22C:080/104 Programming for Informatics or Consent of Instructor.

Lecture:

Topic Reading
Jan, 22 - Introduction, Introduction to VR  Chapter 1 Bowman, et. al.
Jan, 24 - Introduction to VR, History of VR  Chapter 1 - 2 Bowman, et. al., I.E. Sutherland, "A Head-mounted Three-dimensional Display," in 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference, AFIPS Conference Proceedings, vol. 33, pp. 757-764, 1968.
Jan, 29 - History of VR  Chapter 2 Bowman, et. al.,
Jan, 31 - Visual Displays  Bowman et. al. p 27-59  The Ultimate Display,

Presenter: Spencer Kuhl (Brooks,Jr., F.P., 1999: "What's Real About Virtual Reality?" IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications,19, 6:16-27)

Feb, 5 - Visual Displays Presenter: Keith Perry (Carolina Cruz-Neira, Daniel Sandin, & Thomas A. Defanti. Surround-screen Projection-based Virtual Reality: The Design & Implementation of the CAVE. Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH, 1993, pp. 135-142)
Feb, 7 - Head Mounted Displays Presenter: Christopher Bush (Tan, D.S., Gergle, D., Scupelli, P.G., and Pausch, R., "With Similar Visual Angles, Large Displays Improve Spatial Performance".  Proceedings of SIGCHI 2003, 217-224, Ft. Lauderdale, FL, April 2003)
Programming Assignment 1: Due March 25th Final

Demo Time Slots: Mon, March 24th 1pm - 6pm

Tue, March 25th 12:30 - 2:15pm and 4:00-6:00pm

 Requirements Page, Code snippet for reading gamepad or joystick: joystick.c, joystick.h

Sample Models for Assignment: Sample Models.zip (Models in Wavefront Object Format *.obj, *.mtl, and *.rgb)
Feb, 14 - Head Tracked Displays and Stereo  Bowman et. al. p 34-49
Feb, 19 - Head Tracked Displays and Stereo  
Feb, 21 - Presentations: Virtual Humans Presenter: Timofey Grechkin (Cassell, J.: Embodied conversational interface agents. Communications of ACM 43 (2000)70-78)

Presenter: Noah Abrahamson (Garau, M., Slater, M., Pertaub, D. P. and Razzaque, S. (2005) The responses of people to virtual humans in an immersive virtual environment, Presence-Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 14(1), 104-116)
Feb, 26 - Virtual Human Interfaces
Feb, 28 - Coordinate Systems

               Basic 2D and 3D Transforms Review

 SVE Paper: G. Drew Kessler, Doug A. Bowman, Larry F. Hodges, "The Simple Virtual Environment Library: An Extensible Framework for Building VE Applications (2000)", Presense: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, Vol 9, Issue 2, p. 187-208.
 
Mar, 6 - Presence Presenter: Arvind Suryakumar (Slater, M., and Usoh, M. (1994) Body Centred Interaction in Immersive Virtual Environments, in N. Magnenat Thalmann and D. Thalmann (eds.) Artificial Life and Virtual Reality, John Wiley and Sons, 1994, 125-148)
Wrapper Function for OpenAL in SVE Add these two classes to your project, it uses alu.h and al.h from OpenAL ,and include the path to headers and .lib files in your Project configuration.  You will also need to OpenAL32.lib in your additional dependencies setting for your project.

sve-al.h, sve-al.c, and USAGE SVE_AL.doc
Mar, 11 - NO CLASS IEEE Virtual Reality Conference 2008, Reno, Nevada March 8 - 12.
March, 13th: Mid Term 1 All lectures and papers Introduction through Presence!!

TEST SOLUTION - AVE = 79%, SD = 11.5, Min = 55%, Max = 98%
March, 25th: Proposal presentations, and Assignment 1 due 15 Minute Presentations/Group, See: Project Ideas and Proposal
April, 01 - Tracking Systems in VR Reading: Chapter 4, Bowman et. al.
April, 10 - Tracking Systems in VR Presenter: Jake Nickel [Welch, Greg and Eric Foxlin (2002). .Motion Tracking: No Silver Bullet, but a Respectable Arsenal,. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, special issue on .Tracking,. November/December 2002, 22(6): 24.38.]
April, 15 - Tracking Systems in VR Reading: Chapter 5, Bowman et. al.
April, 17 - 3D UI Design and Principles

                 3D UI and Travel/Navigation

 Presenter: Chelsey Keller [S. Feiner, B. MacIntyre, T. Höllerer, and T. Webster, A touring machine: Prototyping 3D mobile augmented reality systems for exploring the urban environment. In: Proc. ISWC '97 (First Int. Symp. on Wearable Computers), October 13-14, 1997, Cambridge, MA. Also as: Personal Technologies, 1(4), 1997, pp. 208-217]
April, 22 - Preliminary Deliverables Date! PROJECT DEMONSTRATIONS IN ADLER E220
April, 24 - 3D UI and Travel/Navigation Reading: Chapter 5 and 6, Bowman et. al.
May, 1 -    Paper Presentations Presenter: Qi Mo [Usoh, M., K. Arthur, M. Whitton, R. Bastos, A. Steed, M. Slater and F. Brooks. "Walking > walking-in-place > flying in virtual environments". Proc. of SIGGRAPH '99, Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series. 1999 p 359-364.]

Presenter: Thomas Hansen [Bowman, D. and Hodges, L. An Evaluation of Techniques for Grabbing and Manipulating Remote Objects in Immersive Virtual Environments. Proceedings of the 1997 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, 1997, pp. 35-38.]

Presenter: Uday Verma [W. Robinett and R. Holloway. Implementation of flying, scaling, and grabbing in virtual worlds. In Computer Graphics, pages 189-192, 1992.]
May, 6 - Wayfinding

               Paper Presentation

 Chapter 6, Bowman et. al.

Presenter: Ritesh Nadhani [D.Thalmann. The Role of Virtual Humans inVirtual Environment Technology and Interfaces, Proceedings of Joint EC-NSF Advanced Research Workshop, Bonas, France, 1998.]
May, 8 - Public Demonstration Day

               2:30pm - 5pm

 FINAL PROJECT DEMONSTRATIONS IN FRONT OF FACULTY, STUDENTS AND STAFF (CS, ENG, GEO) - RM 317
May, 16 - Comprehensive Final Exam E220 AJB - 7:30am - 9:30am

Acknowledgements:

The lecture notes are based on those created by Dr. Larry Hodges at the University of North Carolina

at Charlotte, and Dr. Benjamin C. Lok at the University of Florida, with their permission. Many many thanks!

Software Libraries for Class Project:

           sve-al.h, sve-al.c, and USAGE SVE_AL.doc

Recommended Textbook:  3D User Interfaces : Theory and Practice by Bowman Kruiff, LaViola, and Poupvrev (ISBN 0-201-75867-9)

Grading:

40%   Group Project

30%   Individual Assignments, Presentations, and Participation

10%   Mid-Term Exam - March 13th

20%   Final Exam

Letter grades will be calculated on a 10-point scale: 90..100 = A, 80..89 = B, etc. The instructor reserves the right to expand the grading scale, if appropriate.

 

Makeup Exams: The final exam is the makeup exam.  If you miss the mid-term exam for any reason, I will count your final exam grade as that grade.  The final exam will be given during the time slot scheduled by the University.  The final exam will not be given at any other time.  Don't plan to leave town before the final exam is given.

 

Class Project:

Forty percent of your grade in this class will be based on a project that you propose.  The project content should be in the broad area of Virtual Environments and should be appropriate to your background (including whether you are an MS, or Ph.D. student), previous experience, and talents.  Example projects from past semesters have included: building virtual environments, building hardware devices, researching an area of VEs not covered in class and teaching the material to the class or doing a research paper on the topic, and developing/implementing algorithms for some aspect of VR software.

 

The project will be given three grades based on the project proposal (20%), the preliminary deliverables (40%), and the final deliverables (40%).   The most important part of the project is your project proposal, since it determines everything about your project, including the grading criteria.  ALL PROJECTS WILL RECEIVE A GRADE AT THE END OF THE SEMESTER BASED ON WHAT HAS BEEN ACCOMPLISHED BY THE DUE DATES.   NOT COMPLETING YOUR PROJECT IS NOT A SUFFICIENT REASON TO GET AN INCOMPLETE.

 

IDEALLY EACH GROUP SHOULD CONSIST OF THREE MEMBERS.