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:
- VR Input Devices
- VR Output Devices
- Computing Architectures for VR
- Modeling
- Programming in VR
- Human Factors
- Applications
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:
- Homeworks: 20%
- Class participation: 15%
- Exam: 25%
- Project: 40%