Building Virtual Environments  

Professor Alan Price


Links and references
Jump to:
Artists Works
Real time rendering and Programming
Game-modding, Machinima, Demoscene
Open Source VR projects
Commercial VR and Game Authoring software


Artists works:

Scalable City
Sheldon Brown

http://www.sheldon-brown.net/scalable/

World Skin

Maurice Benayoun
http://www.benayoun.com/worldskin.html

Osmose, Ephemere
Char Davies
Virtual Space
Published in SPACE in Science, Art and Society. FranÁois Penz, Gregory Radick and Robert Howell, eds.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge Universty Press (2004), pp. 69-104, illus.
http://www.immersence.com/publications/char/CDavies-VirtualSpace_2004.html
http://www.immersence.com/

Placeholder
Brenda Laurel, Rachel Strickland, Rob Tow
http://www.tauzero.com/Rob_Tow/Placeholder/Placeholder.html

The Thing Growing
Josephine Anstey
http://www.ccr.buffalo.edu/anstey/

Hiding spaces: a CAVE of Elusive Immateriality
Cynthia Beth Rubin and Daniel F. Keefe
http://faculty.risd.edu/faculty/cbrubin/vr/hiding_spaces.html
http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/dfk/cavepainting/index.html

Margaret Dolinsky
http://dolinsky.fa.indiana.edu/
http://www.evl.uic.edu/dolinsky/

Be Now Here
Michael Naimark
http://www.naimark.net/projects/benowhere.html

Apparitions
Sheldon Brown
http://www-apparitions.ucsd.edu/project.html

Virtual Dervish
Asylum for Experimental Architecture
Marcos Novak
http://www.centrifuge.org/

F.A.B.R.I.C.A.T.O.R.S. - 'Sound' - cave graphics driven by sound generation
http://www.fabricat.com/

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Real-time rendering programming:

Real-Time Rendering, by Tomas Akenine-Mˆller and Eric Haines
A.K. Peters Ltd., 2nd edition, ISBN 1568811829
http://www.realtimerendering.com/

ShaderTech – GPU Programming
http://www.cgshaders.org/

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Game-modding, Machinima, Demoscene:

Game Modding - "Machinima"

Machinima.com: shooting film in virtual reality

Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences

Demo scene

DEMOing: A new emerging art form or just another digital craft? - an article by Shirley Shor & Aviv Eyal

Scene.org - a great starting point for learning about and downloading demos

Orange Juice - The demoscene information center - more info and downloads

Caladox - A demo a day keeps the doctor away - Caladox's favorite demos

Crest - demos and demoscene - more descriptions of the demoscene

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Open Source Virtual Reality projects

VR Juggler - Open Source Virtual Reality - VR Juggler provides virtual reality (VR) software developers with a suite of application programming interfaces (APIs) that abstract, and hence simplify, all interface aspects of their program including the display surfaces, object tracking, selection and navigation, graphics rendering engines, and graphical user interfaces. An application written with VR Juggler is essentially independent of device, computer platform, and VR system. VR Juggler may be run with any combination of immersive technologies and computational hardware.

VeLib - The Virtual Environments Library (veLib) is a light-weight yet complete cross-platform software framework for distributed realtime virtual reality (VR) simulations.
It was designed to offer a convenient and unified interface for all sorts of different input and output devices and to hide the hazzle of different system architectures and communication methods from the user under a simple generic abstraction layer. Its design goals are, roughly ordered from most to least important, scalability, extensibility, flexibility, stability, simplicity, ease of use, performance, completeness, fanciness.

Delta3D - Delta3D is an Open Source engine which can be used for games, simulations, or other graphical applications. Its modular design integrates other well-known Open Source projects such as Open Scene Graph, Open Dynamics Engine, Character Animation Library, and OpenAL. Rather than bury the underlying modules, Delta3D just integrates them together in an easy-to-use API -- always allowing access to the important underlying components. This provides a high-level API while still allowing the end user the optional, low-level functionality.

Panda3D - Panda3D is a 3D engine: a library of subroutines for 3D rendering and game development. The library is C++ with a set of Python bindings. Game development with Panda3D usually consists of writing a Python program that controls the the Panda3D library. Panda3D was developed by Disney for their massively multiplayer online game, Toontown. It was released as free software in 2002. Panda3D is now developed jointly by Disney and Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center.

VRPN - The Virtual-Reality Peripheral Network (VRPN) is a set of classes within a library and a set of servers that are designed to implement a network-transparent interface between application programs and the set of physical devices (tracker, etc.) used in a virtual-reality (VR) system. VRPN is public-domain software released by the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Syzygy: Cluster-Based VR - Syzygy solves several problems: distributed graphics, distributed sound, distributed systems management, distributed data access, and general I/O device management. There are systems out there that do each of these things, but no one system addresses them all. However, each problem relies on a similar infrastructure for its solution. Syzygy aims to identify that common infrastructure and provide an implementation. Thus, each problem can be solved more easily, and the resulting code base is well-integrated, maintainable, and smaller. In effect, Syzygy is a middleware solution for distributed multimedia.

OpenTracker - OpenTracker is developed to be generic solution to the different tasks involved in tracking input devices and processing tracking data for virtual environments. It provides an open software architecture based on a highly modular design and a configuration syntax based on XML, thus taking full advantage of this new technology. OpenTracker is a first attempt towards a "write once, track anywhere" approach to virtual reality application development.

ARToolKit - ARToolKit is a software library for building Augmented Reality (AR) applications. These are applications that involve the overlay of virtual imagery on the real world .ARToolKit uses computer vision algorithms to solve this problem. The ARToolKit video tracking libraries calculate the real camera position and orientation relative to physical markers in real time.

Scalable High Performance Virtual Reality Project - First developments include two open source softwares, Net Juggler and SoftGenLock. The association of these libraries makes possible to run a VR Juggler application with active stereo and multi displays on a commodity component PC cluster:

FreeVR HomePage - FreeVR is an open-source virtual reality interface/integration library. It has been designed to work with a wide variety of input and output hardware, with many device interfaces already implemented. One of the design goals was for FreeVR applications to be easily run in existing virtual reality facitilies, as well as newly established VR systems. The other major design goal is to make it easier for VR applications to be shared among active VR research sites using different hardware from each other.

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Commercial VR and Game Authoring software

Virtools - Virtools' revolutionary technology allows you to create interactive applications by graphically assembling "behaviors" in Dev 's intuitive interface. Flexible and easy-to-use, Virtools' reusable "behavior building blocks" accelerate the production cycle and allow you to elaborate on previous projects. Use the "behavior library" or program your own behaviors with Virtools' Software Development Kit (SDK).

Quest3D - The unique 'channel' system of Quest3D gives you have full control over your projects. This method does not require any programming because you can edit everything graphically.The real-time nature of the program means you are directly working on your end result. You have loads of room try out new concepts and realize the concept you have in your head.

3D Game Studio - Games authoring systems are the future of game programming. Even with no programming knowledge, by following the step-by-step tutorial you can build a simple action game in one afternoon. By investing a little more time you can create games in commercial quality, and successfully publish and sell them! If you want to know more about GameStudio's capabilities, try the demos, visit the screenshot gallery, read the frequently asked questions or the recent issue of the users magazine...

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