VirtuaSuite
Jonathan A. Chain
Purpose:
For many high school students, searching for a college is an agonizing task. There is so much to know about each college it can be overwhelming to many teenagers. Speaking from experience, one of their major concerns is where they will be living. Currently, the only way to find this out is to visit the school. However, for students considering schools scattered across the country, it may not be feasible to travel to all of the schools under consideration. So if one cannot visit the school to find out where they will be living, how are they to make an educated decision?
Currently, the answer is to look at pretty pictures that colleges post in their brochure, or imagine a room based on measurements. This information is insufficient for any student to really know what kind of living environment is in store for them.
In our virtual reality course, we have learned that VR can provide a way for a user to exist in an environment he or she would otherwise be unable to experience. Hence, VR can provide a way for prospective college students to experience their potential living conditions without visiting the school in person.
We constructed VirtuaSuite in the image of our own suite, since it was a convenient environment to model. We needed only to look around when creating our virtual world. We obtained room measurements and used our own eye to create everything to scale. We used VRMLpad to write our virtual worlds, and we testing them with the Cortona browser. Some models contained in the suite were taken from other websites, and this has been noted at the bottom of this page.
Click on the link below to open VirtuaSuite into a new window.
We tried to maximize the feeling of presence in the suite using several methods. We believe the most important way to make the user feel that he or she is actually in the suite is to make it as interactive as possible.
I. Light switches.
a. Initially, when the user enters the suite, the lights are out, and we default the browser’s headlights to off. While navigating the environment, the visitor may click on the light switches to turn the lights on and off.
b. We implemented the light switches by defining a single Proto file, and duplicating it throughout the environment. The switch itself when touched, toggles the eventOut turnOn. When the switch is in the lower position, the output is FALSE, and when the switch is in the upper position, the output is TRUE. Refer to the vrmlscript text to see the script behind this functionality.
c. The eventOut of the switch is routed to the proper eventIn fields of the lamps. Thus, by clicking on the light switch, the user can illuminate the room.
II. Movie Screen:
a. In our suite, we are blessed with projector, which projects the TV onto a blanket on the wall. To simulate this in the suite, the projector is a touch sensor, and the isActive is routed to the screen Prototype.
b. The screen prototype turns on and off when a value of TRUE is passed to it. Refer to the vrmlscript text to see the workings of this prototype.
III. Toilet:
a. By clicking on the toilet handle, the user can flush the toilet, and by clicking on the seat, it raises
IV. Other:
a. The user can open desk drawers
b. The user can open doors
Of course, no suite is every empty, there are always friends hanging around, watching TV. We attempt to recreate this feeling of not being alone by including our robots within the suite. One robot is constantly running around the suite(This is supposed to be our roommate, Juan). Other robots are at their desks, or waiting to watch TV. It is interesting to point out that when students visit rooms at colleges, they see rooms that have been set aside for tours. These rooms are unpopulated, and sometimes unlived in. Our suite is populated and the furniture is arranged to give it a personal, lived in look. So in fact, our suite has the potential to be a friendlier environment than the real thing!
In order to maintain a great degree of presence, we wanted to keep the frame rate high.
I. Textures
a. The windows have textures to simulate blinds. We originally planned to have each horizontal blind represented by an individual frame, but implementing the blinds with a partially transparent texture improved frame rate.
b. The microfridge(combination microwave and refridgerator) took great advantage of textures. The doors are all textures. Inside, instead of creating individual items, we merely pasted a texture. This saved development time while maintaining performance and realism.
II. LOD
a. The bathroom contains the tub and the toilet. Both of these objects were creating using very large indexedFace sets, and thus had a very large polygon count. Since the user can not always see the bathroom, and in the case of the tub, cannot see most of the object until very close, we implemented these two items with LOD nodes. This also improved the frame rate. The warddrobe also has a hi and low resolution model.
III. Background
a. We using a Background to simulate a horizon that is visible out the window of the suite. This proved to be very computationally unintensive.
We wanted the suite to seems somewhat alive to the user. To achieve this, we animated the robot, and allowed the user to play a movie by clicking on the projector.
To make the world look realistic, we used textures. Notably, the bed sheets are all implemented with textures. Most of the textures we created ourselves with the exception of the magazine covers monkey bed cover, and brick textures. We attempted to implement the bathroom items using basic geometries, but this yielded the most unrealistic toilet ever. To remedy this, we found a toilet online that was created using indexedFace sets. We also incorporate sounds into the suite. For example, the toilet flushes, the lights click, and the movie on the projector screen has sound.
We did not wish to have one long .wrl file. Also, since two people were created objects in the suite, it made more sense to create multiple files and objects and use inline and externProto to bring it all together. There is a main frame, that inlines all of the rooms. Then, each room itself inlines objects. This allowed us to have a modular implementation that made creating, testing, and changing the world very easy.
Several of the more complex objects were downloaded off the internet and modifed to our specifications. The unmodified models' internet references are included here:
faucet: http://home.iae.nl/users/vdhamer/bathroom/faucet1.wrl
toilet and bathtub "hi resolution" models: http://nihei3.inf.aomori-pc.ac.jp/vrml/itiran_2.asp
small tv: http://www.ceres.dti.ne.jp/~kekenken/main/3d/vr7rike/kagu/tv.wrl
sinks: http://home.iae.nl/users/vdhamer/bathroom/atlantic.wrl
Overall, this was a very exciting project to work as well as very rewarding. Our idea of creating the suite was a great motivator in getting as much detail we could. As one can see, VRML and virtual reality have great benefits because one can get an idea of what a Rutgers dorm looks like from across the country or even from another country. This is just one of the implementations that VR can be applied to.