Last edited 6may08 by gfrancis@uiuc.edu Find this document at http://cheer/reulab/web.
Presentation times may be advanced up 20 minutes earlier than scheduled.

Public Presentations of Math 198 Projects, REU Lab, 102 Altgeld

Monday, 5 May 2008

1:00 PM Monday
Will Davis illiSol: A Modern Orrery - 2008
This joint project with Mike Hutches creates a contemporary orrery in the immersive virtual environment of the CUBE and the CAVE at the University of Illinois. The motion of the planets and their moons around the sun is based on information provided by the Jet Propulsion Lab. Orrery visitors can interactively alter time and magnification of the major planets and Sol, to show just how big our solar system is, -- and just how small the earth really is in comparison.

1:30 PM Monday
Mike Hutches Voyager: Traversing the Modern Orrery
In this part of a joint project with Will Davis to create a modern orrery of our solar system in the CUBE, the date will be set to August 20, 1977. On this date NASA lauched Voyager II, and soon thereafter, Voyager I. These missions were designed to explore the far reaches of the solar system and will soon be leaving it, becoming humanity's first intergalactic space crafts. The project illustrates the maneuver of "gravity assist" to propel a small mass around a large.

2:00 PM Monday
Qiancheng Sun illiMaze: Daedalus Redrawn
This project constructs a perfect maze, or one with no loops and therefore a single path between any two points. A Depth-First Search algorithm is used to both construct and solve the maze, composed of 90 degree turns and walls. The programming strategy is recursive, and is written in C++/OpenGL.

2:30 PM Monday
Michael Mlsna illiBalloon: A Dubious Experiment in Levity 2008
This project models a hot air balloon as it rises and falls according to Archimedes' Principle of Boyancy. The upward, or boyant force on an object submerged in a fluid is the weight of the displaced fluid. In the case of hot air balloons, the displaced fluid is the cool air of the surrounding atmosphere. Thus the boyancy reduces to the difference in the pressure between the hot inside air and the cool outside air. The project is implemented in VPython.

3:00 PM Monday
Eric Hofreiter A Regular Polytope Generator
This program generates arbitrary regular polytopes in n-dimensions and displays their projection in 3-space. The polytopes are specified by their Schl\"afli Symbol, which compactly contains all the information necessary to describe all the regular polytopes in all dimensions.

Friday, 9 May 2008, 9-12 am

9:00 AM Friday
Jared SchaberCFD CUDA: Accessing the power of a GPU for 3-D simulations
This project focuses on learning how to program the NVIDIA GPU so that it's SIMD parallel computation capabilities can be harnessed to assist rendering in virtual environments. Using the 2D Navier Stokes simulation fluidsGL provided in the SDK, I will separate the computational code from the graphics handling code, by storing the data and using in an OpenGL animation. The next step is to set up a pipe between the computation and the animation codes for interactivity. Finally, the pipe will be replaced with a socket so that the GPU can join a Syzygy graphics cluster running a virtual environment.

9:30 AM Friday
Chase Boren Tevatron Modeller
This project simulates a particle accelerator at Fermi Lab in the CUBE virtual environment. Proton-antiproton collisions at ca 980 GeV are slowed down for observation. The resultant particles have color coded tails of a preset length which are visible for several seconds before the next collision. The CUBE visitor can walk around the simulated collision chamber and handle proton stream.

10:00 AM Friday
Yost Smith illiWii:A Friendly Foray into Frugal Flying
This project takes the Nintendo Wii controllers, the wiimote and the Nunchuck, and uses their Bluetooth wireless connectivity to control Syzygy applications in the CAVE and CUBE virtual environments. The Wiimote and Nunchuck use an accelerometer to furnish Euler angles for the driver. The driver converts this into an OpenGL matrix (orientation plus position). Through the insertion of a small bit of pForth code to filter the output of the driver before it enters Syzygy we can alter how the application interprets our movement of the Wiimote and Nunchuck, thus allowing multiple profiles of "flying" through the CAVE and CUBE with the modification of a single line of code.

10:30 PM Friday
Dan Widing Control Systems in Syzygy
The use of control systems pervades a wide range of Syzygy applications. This project provides a physics system supporting a simple one-person game in which a space ship attempts to reach a point in space in a specific orientation. The player can alter the variables of the control system to influence the outcome. As a special feature, the player can limit or extend the available degrees of freedom of the system, thereby deepening an understanding of the control system.

11:00 AM Friday
Xichen Jiang Electromagnetic Fields
This VPython project simulates the interactions of particles in an electromagnetic field. It assumes that all collisions are elastic. The particle's motion is governed by Newton's Second Law. The forces of the particle come from the superposition of gravity, the electric field, and the magnetic field.

11:30 AM Friday
Nathan Baird CellAuto:
Conway's Game of Life is a simulation of an environment in which individuals are born and die depending on the population of their neighborhoods. This is perhaps the most famous 2-D cellular automaton (CA). This project investigates visualization issues with 3-dimensional generalizations of such cellular automation.

12:00 noon Friday
Yubo "Burney" Jia Snake World
This project implements a 3D version of the popular, 2D game Snake from the late 1970s. In the game, the player controls a long, thin "snake" that continuously moves along the screen. The goal is to eat food items scattered around the field. Each time food is consumed, the snake's tail grows longer. The game ends if the snake collides with the boundary, an obstacle, or its own tail.