IGR205 - Project Seminar

At the end of the course, after the final presentation, each team has to send both the supervisor and the organizers (Kiwon and Jan) one zip file that contains (1) a presentation PDF file and (2) a report PDF file.

We value academic integrity; thus, you must understand the meaning and consequences of plagiarism. You can refer to existing codes, texts, and any materials that would be useful for your project. However, you must be careful to reuse them properly.

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Collaborative Multi-user Presentation Tools — Supervisor: James Eagan

The goal of this project is to create a new presentation tool based on Webstrates. This tool should explore ways to satisfy the different needs of these different user populations in the context of a single presentation document. It should go beyond presenter notes (intended to be read by the presenter) to include audience notes (intended to be read by the audience) and text-centric readings. Finally, it should take advantage of the dynamic and interactive capabilities of the web, allowing for integrating different web applications directly into the presentation support. For example, in a programming class, it slides should support interactively editing code examples, or for letting students dynamically add content to the presentation in a structured way. The minimal solution will provide an implementation that satisfies the above goals, but this is an open-ended project: there is plenty of room for creativity in orienting the design and exploring different ways to satisfy these goals. Each group will meet weekly with the project supervisor to collaboratively orient the direction of the project.

Plant bio-actuation and novel interactions — Supervisor: Harpreet Sareen

The goal of this project is to interface the capabilities of a living plant with a digital function to establish bidirectional input-output. We will specifically look at leaf movements of a Mimosa Pudica or a Venus Flytrap plant, and connect them with a custom software to prepare a bioactuation interface. Three students are able to work on this project to prepare an initial biohybrid circuit. Students are then encouraged to think outside the box for research applications of such an interface. What if there one plant movement triggers another plant movement at a different location? What actions/notifications on phones or routine activities in home are suitable for plant bioactuation? The students will then implement this application showcasing specific scenarios that leverages and showcases this novel type of interaction. Each group is expected to meet once a week with their supervisor and discuss their ideas and the direction of the project. The students will be provided with the relevant living plants and initial circuitry for plant actuation. Attention: The first half of the project, Prof. Sareen will be supervising the group remotely from New York and later in the year (depending on the COVID situation) physical meetings will be possible. The students will get support by Jan Gugenheimer on issues that need to be addressed in person.

Exploring New Forms of Social Media in Virtual Reality — Supervisors: Jan Gugenheimer and Wen-Jie Tseng

The goal of this project is to design and implement interaction and interface around creating and sharing contents on the VR platform, which can be one of the future forms of social media. Students are encouraged to think outside the box and forget traditional interface of social media (e.g. what if we could share a clip of VR experience, or what if we would record a series of motions in a VR game?). In a first step, each group will receive one Oculus Quest and will design and develop their novel form of social media in VR. In a second step, the students will implement their idea using Unity3D and the Oculus SDK. The last step, consists of implementing an application (e.g. a simple game) that leverages and showcases this novel type of interaction. Each group is expected to meet once a week with their supervisor and discuss their ideas and the direction of the project. Each student will get an Oculus Quest to be able to develop individually. Due to the complex implementation requirement students should have some prior knowledge in C# and ideally Unity development.

Immersed Labor: Gamifying Daily Chores using Virtual Reality — Supervisor: Jan Gugenheimer

The goal of this project is to design and implement a virtual environment in which the user is playing a game through actions that correspond to a chore in the real world. Students will have to learn the skills necessary to implement a virtually aligned environment and follow a creative process to design and implement a simple game application in VR. In a first step, each student will receive one Oculus Quest and will have to follow Unity 3D tutorials to learn how to program and deploy a first VR application. In a second step, the students will together implement an application that is able to align the virtual and physical world and spawn simple geometry (e.g., cubes and circles) that can be used to approximate the user’s individual environment. In a last step, each student will implement a short individual game that leverages the aligned world to mask a physical chore (e.g., cleaning the room, hoovering, wiping surfaces, watering the plants). Each group is expected to meet once a week with their supervisor and discuss their ideas and the direction of the project. Each student will get an Oculus Quest to be able to develop individually.

Interactive Layered Terrain Generation — Supervisor: Élie Michel

Procedural landscape generation often relies on a layered representation, where each point of a grid is mapped to a stack of different materials (dirt, water, sand, snow, etc.). The goal of this project is to implement this representation in order to first reproduce classical erosion mechanisms [Št’ava08] and then imagine your own phenomena, drawing inspiration from subsequent works such as avalanches [Cordonnier18] or desertscape [Paris19] simulations. The implementation must run at an interactive rate, and may include user input to add/remove matter to some layers (e.g. triggering rain around the mouse).

Wave Function Collapse — Supervisor: Élie Michel

Wave Function Collapse (WFC) is a constraint-solving algorithm [Karth17] that was first designed for texture generation [Gumin16] but has been quickly used for enhancing 3D tile-based content generation [Stalberg18] (right-hand image above), in particular to mitigate the repetition effects that tile-based approaches usually suffer from. Given a collection of tiles and rules telling how they are allowed to neighbor each others, WFC assigns a tile to each slot. The goal of this project is to implement WFC, maybe first in 2D (like [Stalberg17]) and then in 3D, and finally generalize to irregular grids. You should also find tile sets for which it fails at converging in a reasonable time.

Partial and Approximate Symmetry Detection for 3D Geometry — Supervisor: Jean-Marc Thiery

Le projet consiste en l’implémentation de la technique décrite dans l’article de référence, technique qui permet de détecter de manière robuste les symétries partielles dans les surfaces 3D. La technique se base sur une sorte de Hough Transform généralisée : Des paires de points sont utilisées comme candidates si il existe une transformation permettant de passer de l’un (point+normale) à l’autre (point+normale). Si une telle transformation existe, celle-ci est stockée dans un espace paramétrique. En répétant ce procédé, on peut détecter quelles transformations sont utilisées pour de nombreuses paires (à l’aide d’un Mean Shift dans l’espace paramétrique des transformations), et donc détecter quelles sont les symétries locales principales de l’objet.

Symmetry Factored Embedding And Distance — Supervisor: Jean-Marc Thiery

Le projet consiste en l’implémentation de la technique décrite dans l’article de référence, technique qui permet de détecter de manière robuste les symétries dans les surfaces 3D. La technique se base sur la définition d’une distance de diffusion (voir images de gauche) associée à une fonction floue de similarité calculée sur les données brutes comportant potentiellement des symétries imparfaites ou des données manquantes.

Position Based Fluids — Supervisor: Kiwon UM

This project aims for a popular variant of particle-based liquid simulation method, Position Based Fluid (PBF). This requires essential programming/software skills for generating computer animations and good understanding of numerical fluid simulations, which solve the Navier-Stokes equations that model a variety of fluid flows. You are expected to perform autonomous study and research investigating how to generate liquid animations using computer.

An Advection-Reflection Solver for Detail-Preserving Fluid Simulation — Supervisor: Kiwon UM

This project aims for an efficient and effective pipeline for producing smoke animations. This requires thorough understanding of partial differential equations, in particular, the Navier-Stokes equations that model a variety of fluid flows. You are expected to perform autonomous study and investigation of how to generate smoke animations using computer.

Schedule

Evaluation

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