CS 348C is a reading and projects course. The topic for this quarter will be virtual reality. The emphasis will be on input and display technologies and on computational models. Applications will be surveyed mainly to illustrate the strengths or weaknesses of specific techniques. A tentative course outline is included below.
A typical course meeting will consist of an instructor or student presentation of papers from the literature and a discussion of the material. Students who take the course for 1 unit will be expected to make one presentation. Students who take the course for 3 units will also be expected to complete a project of their own choosing. We have a well-equiped laboratory for doing research in virtual reality. A partial list of our toys is included below. We also have access to several commercial modeling, animation, and rendering packages.
Over the years, many student projects in CS 348C have become published papers. Maybe your project will become a Siggraph '97 paper or a dissertation!
Students should have a background in graphics at the level of CS 248.
...plus a variety of high-performance computing and graphics engines. For a more detailed list, see http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/infrastructure
Needless to say, these devices can be combined in a variety of interesting ways. For example, you might scan a bumpy surface using the Cyberware range scanner and try to reproduce it haptically using the Phantom force-feedback arm. Or you might strap a hand-held video camera to the Faro arm, allowing you to acquire free-form image sequences from known camera positions and orientations. This data could be used in an image-based rendering algorithm.