Monthly Archives: April 2013

Update 4/21

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This Friday we were able to try some of our models in the CAVE. The terminal had some issues and the walls didn’t show up. Lauren is going to try building the walls differently to see if it solves the problem. The terminal currently looks like this:

Kevin and Nick tried to put physics on certain objects, but the floor was also not working correctly and the objects were falling through. Hopefully when the terminal is rebuilt the floor will stay in place.

CC is continuing to build her model and has found paintings that we are going to include in one of our games.

Kevin looked at programming voice commands with the Kinect. This is something we will incorporate into our games. It looks like this is going to work well.

Nick continued working on planning the games and as soon as the models are functioning, he will be ready to get those working.

Reminder for Posting

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Both the reading comments and group postings are due tonight.  If you are off campus you will need to VPN into campus or WID.  You can follow the directions in the previously sent email.  As a reminder

First, get the software for vpn by going to this site:

http://vpn.wid.wisc.edu

this will download the correct vpn software.  After you install it log into vpn.wid.wisc.edu using the previously sent name and password.

 

Ski Mountain Update 2

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This week we continued to work on our design. We have decided to refine the design of the mountain to have a cabin embedded into the side of the mountain instead of at the peak. This will half the amount of objects and trails we need to create as now only one side of the mountain will be traversable. The inspiration for this is Mesa Verde:

We were able to get a semi-successful skiing interaction using just the physics engine. We still need to update this as the camera currently faces backwards. We are also exploring using additional methods for friction-less surfaces (e.g., ski-like bounding box instead of sphere). Hopefully this will allow us to have more realistic skiing interactions.

 

Over the course of the next week, we will integrate the Wii fit board into the interaction and will work on the bounding boxes. We will also work to make the runs more interesting by adding additional geometry so that the runs are not a constant angle. We will also begin work on the mountain resort. Our goal is to get the project into the CAVE by the end of the week.

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Below are some images of the modeling work we have completed on the updated Mountain. This week I hope to customize the runs more, as well as work on modeling a mountain resort specific to our project. As Dan stated above, you can see that we cut the size of the mountain in half to limit extra items that needed modeling. In addition, I have changed out the trees to one that is much simpler and have grouped them, so hopefully this will make exporting the file much easier.

The Jasper: Week 3 Update

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4/20/2013

Hi! I finished the materials of restaurant. I also did some animations of ghosts. We also have put all our models in one file. We are going to finish some details in the future.

Scaring Restaurant:

Ghosts animations:

I will export them as FBX and test them in CAVE next week. I hope them works and we can put them everywhere in our project.

The link:

001~1      002~1     003~1     004~1     005~1

The ghost preview:

 

Update from Natalie:

This past week I worked on messing up my model to make it less perfect and more cluttered and messy.  Jerry C just showed me how to create a wall paper texture in photoshop to add some dirt and blood to the walls, so that will be the last thing to add for upstairs to make it more spooky.  I have also modeled a door, shower curtain, and dresser so that Jerry H can begin to play with that animated programing.

Here are some pictures of the upstairs…

Updates from Jerry H:

  • With help from Kevin the instructor I’m getting the foundation of the code settled. Much of our interactive objects will be inherited from the UW in-house lel_common code.
  • I’ve created a door object that will open and close upon interaction. A finding that is relevant for modeling interactive objects:
    • Parts that are moving must be its own component. For example, the actual door must be separated from the door frame and the hinge.
    • Where the moving part is within the component itself is very important. Specifically, if the object is rotating, the rotating axis/point must be (0,0,0) within the component. For example, the point where a door rotates on should be (0,0,0) within the component.
  • We have also checked that FBX animation files should work very well in the CAVE.

 

Updates from Hasti:

  • I’ve finished the modelling and details of the lobby.

  • I am working on modeling the outside of the Jasper and landscape design. I’ve built a  cemetery in the back side of the building (image below):

  • I am also working on the exterior design of the Hotel and I hope to finish it by Thursday.
  • I found the 3D animated model of a spider that I think it would be interesting to add it in our haunted hotel.
    (http://www.turbosquid.com/)

– Here are the 3D models of the spider:

– I’ve also rendered this animation (the link below):

                  spider

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remember to mark you dev lab time

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First, mark your time on the LEL Dev Lab calendar.

 The calendar can be found here

This lets me know when you will be in so I can help you and good for us for record keeping.

Also mark you time in the file if you turn on the Dev Wall:

\\CAVE Shared\DEV_LAB_LOG.csv

add a line to the file that follows the format

[data], [time start], [time stop], and put [ds501] and [your group name]

 

 

Reading 11

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 For class 4/23/13
Post Comments by 11:59 PM on Sunday 4/21/13

Are Driving Simulators Effective Tools for Evaluating Novice Drivers’ Hazard Anticipation, Speed Management, and Attention Maintenance Skills
Elsa Chan, Anuj K. Pradhan, Alexander Pollatsek, Michael A. Knodler,d and Donald L. Fishere
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369847810000185
or
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2923851/

Discussion (pick 3)

  1. Comment on the quote from Evans 2004 about driving simulators.  Do you feel like this can be generalized for other behavior research? Do you feel like this criticism is true for all VR systems?
  2. Comment on the experiment.  What do you think was done well/ well thought out?  What would you change and/or add?
  3. Choose one of the questions in the discussion section (p.351).  Do you agree with the authors analysis?  Why or why not
  4. How would you use the results of this experiment to create better drivers? Describe an implementation you could see one creating.
  5. Find a topic that you interesting, dubious, or curious and explain why.

 

 

How to get/use OpenSceneGraph Viewer

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There are several ways to get OpenSceneGraph Viewer.

Install VirtualLab

1. Install Virtual Lab.  Directions here.

2. Right click on your osg or ive file and choose open with.

 

3. Click the browse button

4. Navigate to Virtual Lab folder (e.g. ProgamFiles (x86)\Mechdyne\VirtualLab).  Go into the bin folder inside of the virtual lab folder.  There you should find a program called osgviewer.  Choose that.

From now on, you can simply double click on osg files and they will open in osg viewer.

Install OpenSceneGraph Windows

coming soon (the site to download OSG is currently down)

Install OpenSceneGraph OS X

coming soon (the site to download OSG is currently down)

How do I get the entity for the Wand, User, and the View?

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user = VRScript.Core.Entity(‘User0’)
head = VRScript.Core.Entity(‘User0Head’)
wand = VRScript.Core.Entity(‘User0Hand’)

The user is entity for the capsule in the center of the CAVE meaning the physical position of the user is not accounted for.  The head is the entity where the head tracker is, so it does account the the physical position of the user and the viewing orientation.  The wand refers to entity for the wand device and can be swapped out if you don’t want the red beam.

How to Overwrite Your Old Sketchup Export

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You may have noticed that when you try to save over top of your previous sketchup export that it opens the folder as opposed to saving.  There is a pretty simple work around, add “.py” to the name of your export.  For example

if I want to overwrite the KevinTest2 export, I simply type “KevinTest2.py” into the dialogue box.  This helps from needing to make lots of export folders and constantly changing launch locations.