Announcements and Frequently Asked Questions

• Jan 7, 9 - First week, Introduction. PDF
• Jan 14, 16 - Basics of Computer Graphics. PDF
• Jan 21, 23 - Displays, Input PDF
• Jan 28, 30 - Animation, Interpolation PDF
• Feb 4 - Interaction in VR PDF
• Feb 6 - Interaction in VR: Selection and Manipulation PDF
• Feb 8 - lab scheduled for today has been postponed. Please check your CS email for details.
• Feb 11 - Interaction in VR: Travel PDF
• Feb 25 - Interaction in VR: System control and symbolic input in VR PDF
• Feb 27 - Stereo Image Generation PDF
• Mar 04 - Aural Displays PDF
• Mar 04 - Next lab will take place on Friday, Mar 8.
• Mar 05 - Assignment 2 is posted.
• Mar 06 - Social and Collaborative VR PDF
• Mar 11 - Ubiquitous Virtual Reality PDF
• Mar 11 - Kinect now works fine on VR02. To use it, first start the FAAST server and press the Connect button in the window that opens. Then open the MiddleVR configuration and add a new VRPN tracker Tracker0@localhost with 24 trackers. The joints are defined as in http://projects.ict.usc.edu/mxr/faast/. If it doesn't work, try running FAAST as an administrator. The same steps should work on VR01, as they do not rely on MS Kinect SDK and thus does not need newer versions of the OS.
• Mar 13 - Networked Virtual Reality, Part 1 PDF
• Mar 18 - Networked Virtual Reality, Part 2 PDF
• Mar 18 - To use Polhemus, you should start a VRPN server ("shorcut to vrpn_server.exe or run it from C:\Program Files\vrpn\pc_win32\server_src\vrpn_server\Debug\vrpn_server.exe). The server is already configured to open the tracker we have in the lab and have it output the data (it can support many other trackers). For Kinect, see the updated instructions above. The red buttons on the black box cannot be used, unfortunately.
• Mar 27 - VR Summary, using 3D displays PDF
• Mar 27 - MiddleVR 1.2.0 Academic x86

General Information

• Introduction: applications, human sensory/motor system & capabilities
• Review of interactive 3D graphics programming. Real-time rendering (levels-of-detail, impostors, etc.), graphics hardware, distributed rendering
• Virtual Reality Technology (VR): VR input devices, filtering & tracking, VR output devices, Augmented Reality (AR) hardware, spatial audio, haptics
• Virtual Environments (VE): event driven simulation, procedural animation, physics-based modelling, collision detection & response, simulation & rendering in parallel, interaction with VE, haptic and auditory simulation
• Human Factors: presence, immersion, simulator sickness (frame-rate, latency, vergence vs. accommodation, visual vs. vestibular, etc), training (fidelity, transfer)
• Applications: training, collaborative virtual environments, medical, visualisation & decision support, design, entertainment, augmented reality, space applications, teleoperation, computer games

Time, Location	MW 10:00–11:30, CB 122
Instructor	Andriy Pavlovych
E-mail	(please include "4471" in the subject line)
Office Hours	LAS 2001C, by appointment
TA	Andrew Speers,

Textbook (recommended)

• M. Gutierrez, A. Vexo and D. Thalmann, Stepping into Virtual Reality, Springer, 2008

Recommended Reading Material

• Books on Unity (unity3d.com)

Evaluation

Assignments are due at 17:00, Eastern Time (in Winter: UTC–5), on the specified day and are to be submitted electronically with the submit command in Prism (unless specified otherwise).

Numerical scores (out of 100) are used to calculate grades. Each piece of work will receive a numerical grade. A final numerical grade will be obtained by weighting the individual pieces of work and this will be converted to a letter grade as follows:

Percentage	Letter
90–100	A+
80–89.99	A
75–79.99	B+
70–74.99	B
65–69.99	C+
60–64.99	C
55–59.99	D+
50–54.99	D
40–49.99	E
0–39.99	F

The drop date is March 15, 2013.

Course Policies