Message sent out to all CM-related faculty before semester starts

It's that time again!!

We are once again looking for interesting and challenging projects for
our junior and senior Computational Media majors to tackle for their
capstone Design Project class - CS 4911. If you have a project that you
would like a senior design team to work on, please send me a brief
description as soon as possible, and I'll see if we can recruit some
students for you. Two example projects appear at the end of this message.

The first class meets on Monday, January 5–so the sooner you can get your
project ideas to me, the better advertising I can include on the first
day of class. I can accept project ideas through 10 AM on Wednesday,
January 9.

Most students will have selected projects and be on teams by Friday of
the first week, so those projects advertised on Monday have the
greatest chance of being selected.

We no longer have the policy where the sponsors of the projects also
must act as advisors for the students. You may sponsor a project and
your only responsibility is to meet with the students to give them
customer feedback. The instructor for the course will handle all the
grading and advising. (Of course you can still directly advise the
students if you wish, and in fact, you are more likely to get the
results you want if you do. ) Also, if you enjoy advising a team but do
not have a project let me know and I will match you up with a team you
can mentor.

We also had some projects over Fall semester either not selected, or so
large they could not be completed in one semester. Please let me know
if you would like your past semester proposal reactivated for Spring 2009.

Useful projects for CM majors include:

Creating of complex computational media, such as a website or documentation project.
Creation or modification of a software project that is CM-related, like creation of a game or creating an infrastructure or tool (such as a display mode that simulates television for an Atari VCS).
Design and implementation of a user-interface for an existing backend.
Creating a component of an on-going project.

Thanks in advance for the projects,

Mark Guzdial

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Many important early home computers and videogame consoles were displayed on ordinary CRT televisions rather than dedicated monitors. Such systems included the Commodore 64 and the Atari VCS, among many others. In today's age of crisp, calibrated LCD displays, it's easy to forget that a television displays pictures very differently than a monitor. A CRT picture is displayed by an electron gun shining light on a phosphor-coated surface, moving back and forth by lines rather than drawing an entire screen. Certain visual differences are very apparent: the glow of the phosphor takes a while to fade away, the texture of the picture tube changes the way flat areas of color appear. The curvature of the screen creates distortions and glares. The individual scanlines bleed into one another. The purpose of this project is to write an emulator that mimics the look of the CRT display on a modern LCD monitor. It would be used to create more "authentic" experiences of emulated systems, including the Atari and Commodore. For the purposes of this project, the goal will be to add onto the open source Stella Atari VCS emulator (stella.sourceforge.net) and rewrite its rendering system to (optionally) support the CRT display. However, ideally, the CRT system would be a more generic graphics mode that any program could be forced to render in.

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I am looking for a team to design and develop an educational "serious game" in which the user can explore a prehistoric world populated by believable, lifelike dinosaurs. Tasks include refining the design, implementing the gameplay mechanics, and animating dinosaur models. Work will be done by "modding" the Unreal Tournament 3 engine. Dinosaur models exist but are not animated, so extensive use of Maya and/or 3D Studio Max for creating animation behaviors is required. Experience with Maya and/or 3D Studio Max is mandatory. Experience with modding game engines is helpful but not required.

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Last modified 30 October 2008 at 8:10 pm by Mark Guzdial