CS 499

Virtual Reality

Meets

Monday 4:30 pm - 7:10 pm in Innovation Hall 129

Professor

Zoran Duric.

Course Web Page

http://cs.gmu.edu/~zduric/cs499.html

Prerequisites

CS 310 and CS 367, MATH 203 (Linear Algebra) recommended

Textbook

The text is G. C. Burdea and P. Coiffet, Virtual Reality Technology, 2nd Ed., John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003. I strongly recommend that you buy the book. Additionally, articles and other supplementary materials will be assigned as readings for the class.

About the Class

This class will focus on various virtual realities and systems. The Laboratory for the Study and Simulation of Human Movement owns several motion capture systems and several haptic devices there will be some demonstrations of these systems in the laboratory. A significant part of the course grade will be a project with a Kinect device. These will be team projects and I will provide the devices. You will have to find your own computer to use the device.

Topics

Planned topics include:

Class attendance

I expect you to attend every class. You will be expected to participate and this participation will be a part of your grade.

Communications

This term we will be using Piazza for class discussion. The system is highly catered to getting you help fast and efficiently from classmates and myself. Rather than emailing questions to me, I encourage you to post your questions on Piazza. If you have any problems or feedback for the developers, email team@piazza.com.
Find our class page at: Piazza CS499-002

Projects

There will be semester long team projects using Microsft Kinect devices. You will present project proposals early and those will be critiqued. The entire class is expected to participate in discussion during project proposal presentations and final project presentations. The project will include writing your own code. You may negotiate during a different project with haptics or some other VR device or environment. However, you will have to be very convincing and make very good and detailed arguments why you should be allowed to do it.

Individual work

Projects are going to be done by groups, but I will require a report showing what each group member has done. You can discuss your projects with others and you can get open source software to use in your project. However, you will have to credit every source properly. Any assignment that is assigned as individual work cannot be discussed with anybody else and it has to be done by you alone.

Read the CS Department honor code and the University honor code. You are bound by these honor codes.

Grading

In addition to the projects there will be homeworks and an ecxam.There will be no makeups on exams except under exceptional circumstances (as judged by me), and any such makeup must be arranged in advance. Grades will be computed using a weighted average of these scores with the weights: