The focus of this project is an open house type atmosphere, with the user allowed inside the house and its surrounding gardens.
House:
The house was built using mostly Extrusion and IndexedFaceSets. The idea was taken from off the web from an online real estate agency, where it came with a floor plan and frontal view. It was not originally in VRML at all, so the entire structure was built manually. It was not really to scale, so some modifications were made. Otherwise, all coordinates are to scale, and are often to several decimal places. The foundation and walls were built using Extrusion on the y-axis, and the roof was built using IndexedFaceSets.
Inside the House:
The house is elevated approximately 18 inches in order to utilize the steps shown in the frontal view. I took measurements of the ceiling, doors, furniture - counter, fridge, sofa, bed..etc..., using inches, then transferred them to metrics measurements since VRML is based 10, or from 0 to 1. This made my calculations easier, if the visualization was a little more difficult. The ceiling is 8 feet, and the roof is approximately the same height again as the main part of the house. All the doors are the same height, at a little more than 6 feet. The front door swings in 90 degrees, as does the bathroom door. The French doors for the bedroom and the patio swing 90 degrees both ways. They have a wooden frame with a piece of semi-transparent "glass" in the middle. All the windows are of different widths, but several are of the same height. Obviously, the window in the bathroom is higher than the large windows in the living room. I used lights from the link given on the recitation page, and they had switches built in, so the three lights can be turned on and off. The furniture were also public models retrieved off the recitation models link or elsewhere online.
Outside the House:
I used Extrusion to build the gravel path, and pasted a tiled texture on it to give it a gravelly look. The path lights were streetlamps shrunk down to the needed size. I was going to light them as well, but since it is daytime, it didn't make sense to have all these garden lights turned on and not really illuminating anything. The "garden" is a little stone courtyard of sorts, centered around a running fountain, with two garden benches and surrounded by shrubs and trees. The trees were difficult to find, so I took pictures of normal trees and cut and paste into Adobe to produce the transparent images needed to make tree or shrub billboards. There is a seagull taken from the model repository that flies around the path, approximately. Level of Detail nodes were used on the small garden lights. The lesser detail model is actually just a colored cylinder positioned where the light shade would be.
Scene:
The first thing the user sees is the front of the house and a part of the garden in the back. There is somewhat of a storyline since this models an open house scenario. It is not a traditional open house, in that one that does not require a real estate agent. The user walks forward ( viewpoint set to fly) and meets the robot. The robot has two touch sensors, one for waving his hand and one to start off a wav file to talk to you. He waves his left hand and welcomes you to the open house. He instructs you to go inside and click on the red ball hanging in the room to activate the sound system, which gives a description of the house. The description starts with the bedroom and points out the size of each room and special features such as the glass doors and patio/deck. This is time for the user to explore the inside of the house and click on things that are clickable or movable. When the user is done exploring the inside of the house, s/he walks out to the octagonal deck and can either go left or right to get off the deck onto the gravel path. The path makes a complete circle around the garden, ending at the deck on either side. Here the user and explore the outside of the house, the path, the fountain and its stereo sound, and the overall landscaping.