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.
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.