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Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology (FEIT)

Dept. of Computer Science (DCS)

eScience : Guest student project

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Title : Building of a transportable VR station with all the packages installed

• Status : Done

• Student : Albert Meige <albert.meige@orange.fr>

• Tutor : Pascal Vuylsteker <pvk@vuylsteker.net>

• Period : 04-06/2002

• Report

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Description

Rod Boswell Proposition

There is a great need at present in the Information Technology area for web based virtual reality tools, especially for virtual presence using the transmission of stereo images without buffering. Albert will be helping with the development of passive stereo projection using polarized DLP projectors and a 800 x 600 mm rear projection screen. This will involve the design and construction of the hardware including the computer system and graphics boards which are stereo enabled and sufficiently fast for direct broadcast of stereo images. In addition, he will aid in the development of software for connecting two of these systems for real time stereo video communication across the ANU ethernet backbone. If there is sufficient time, we hope to be able to broadcast to a more remote site to demonstrate the advantage of the system for teaching outreach

Practical plan

The practical target is to get a ready to use VR station, with a the documentation that would make it easy to reproduce.

Hardware

The hardware will be developed with the help of the PRL as a movable parallelepiped box (an autonomous VR station) that will contain two video projectors with polarized lens, a computer and a screen (linearly polarized, rear projection).

Then different input devices should be connected and tested : the "domino", some joysticks, two video cameras, and a mike.

Software

The installation / test of the following software will be done :

• Windows / output and input video card drivers.
• Java / Java3D / JMF
• Tiwi (test of usual demo)
• TiwiTV (Sam Taylor and Claude Dietrich work, using a simple webcam as a input (test of JMF)
• Java Shared Data Toolkit (JSDT)

The development of the following stuff :

All the proposed API and their installation should be well documented for their use by eScience students, especially by the provision of working and well commented demos that use and illustrate each of the APIs. All the documentation should be presented through a web site installed on ephebe (eScience intranet).

At that stage, Albert should try to use and modify TiwiTV project to send two video streams simultaneously to eventually use them to provide stereo video projection.
First step : the two video streams would be used to texture two different surfaces. The ultimate target would be to present the two streams in such a way that we get stereo video.

Another way to approach the issue is to achieve video acquisition through Java.

An alternative for the choice of JMF could be QuickTime for Java.