14. Introduction to Virtual Reality Full Day / Beginning An introduction to virtual reality using immersive displays. This course covers system requirements, hardware, design of applications, and implementation of virtual worlds. The emphasis is on practical issues that must be addressed to begin working in virtual environments. Who Should Attend Those who wish to create immersive virtual environments. Organizers Anselmo Lastra Henry Fuchs University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Lecturers Pat Gelband Sense8 Stephen Ghee Division Limited Hans Weber University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Randy Pausch University of Virginia Schedule 8:30 am: Introduction - Fuchs Course overview Components of a VR system 9:00 am: Hardware - Lastra This section briefly describes technologies used in commercially available systems, concentrating on the basic knowledge necessary to judge the tradeoffs that must be made when purchasing hardware. We will show key specifications of the major commercial products available on the market at the time the notes go to press. Head-Mounted Displays Specifications, such as field of view What to expect from HMDs Survey of commercial HMDs Image Generators What types of systems you can use for VR Important specs, such as fill rate How to generate separate frames for stereo Survey of IGs 10:00 am: Break 10:15 am: Hardware (continued) - Lastra Trackers Magnetic tracker technology Limitations and problems Survey of trackers Input devices Sound 10:40 am: What can you do in a Virtual World? - Weber So you've just blown your budget on state-of-the-art VR equipment, now what do you do? How do you turn this high priced View Master into a fully immersive, interactive virtual environment? The design of virtual worlds Coordinate Systems for VR Modes of interaction, tools, etc. 12:00 noon: Break 1:30 pm: Alice, a rapid-prototyping development environment - Pausch System overview The separation of rendering from simulation Running simulations with Alice Python, a high-level interpreted language Class libraries Cameras, lights, heads-up-displays Handling text The importance of two-handed interaction techniques Voice and sound Programming Examples 2:30 pm: Distributed Virtual Reality - dVS - Ghee dVISE, a virtual design environment 3:00 pm: Break 3:15 pm: Distributed Virtual Reality - dVS (continued) - Ghee Principles of networked virtual environments 3:50 pm: Virtual Environment Development with WorldToolKit - Gelband Creating geometry Loading DXF, 3DS, OBJ files Constructing geometry interactively Viewpoint configuration Adding sensors Viewpoint parameters Placing dynamic objects Sensor constraints Object snap-to Configuring objects Scaling and deforming objects Object hierarchies Adding behavior to objects Collision detection Pathing and terrain following Optimizing performance Object simplification and level-of-detail 4:50 pm: Conclusion - Lastra

---

			Courses | This Web Site

Final SIGGRAPH 96 Web site update: 25 October 1996.
For complete information on the next conference and exhibition, see: http/www.siggraph.org/s97/