Saturday, May 25, 2013

Sky simulation for dome theater




Wow, long time since I've wrote something here, sorry for that. University is keeping me busy :)
One of things I've been working on is this sky simulation for a dome theater at Visualiseringscenter in Norrköping, along with my classmates Aron Tornberg and Sebastian Piwell. It's done with C++, OpenGL and the library SGCT.

SGCT distributes the workload to 6 different nodes, one for every projector. You can read more about it in the link above. I wrote an external GUI in C# for easy tweaking of some parameters.

All the viewports for the dome projection

Fisheye projection
As the screenshots shows, performance is kind of slow on my laptop, but this is work in progress without any optimizations. Besides, the method we use for the clouds is kinda brute force. This probably won't be a problem in the dome theater, since every node renders a relatively small part of the sky.

I'll update/create a new post with more details once we have finished this. I'll try and get some footage from the dome theater as well :)

Additional credit:
Miroslav Andel, for all the support concerning SGCT

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Summer Of Code @ Linköping University

During April, a mail was sent out to all student at our university talking about a new project the university had started: "Summer of Code"(SOC for short). SOC gives students the possibility to develop one of their own projects during the summer and getting payed by the university. It would be  5 projects would be accepted for this opportunity. A total of 70 projects applied, we were one of them and...


Our projects was accepted!


Fredrik and I had discussed an idea for an smartphone app earlier this year that we wanted to create, and decided to apply to SOC with this idea. The final idea, we will keep a secret for now, but I thought we could still discuss parts of it.

None of us have really worked with app-development before, but you have to start somewhere. Our intentions are to develop for the android platform first and perhap, later for iOS since our target audience is students, and a lot of students use iPads. But we also want to keep developing costs down at a start.

The project consists of 3 major parts: Drawing, Detecting, and Evaluating. The biggest challenge for us right now is the second one, Detecting. None of use have worked with image recognition before. We've been looking into using OpenCV as a framework to help us in this stage. The detection should also be "on the fly" while the user is still drawing to give direct feedback to the user.

We are both looking forward to this July when we will start working and we will do some more updates on the blog for each part during development!