MVisio
From EuroVR Knowledge Base
- Full name
- 3D Mental Vision
- Acronym
- MVisio
- Website
- http://vrlab.epfl.ch/Projects/projects_index.html
- Keywords
- Education, 3D rendering, Teaching Computer Graphics
- Budget
- €
- Start date
- 2005/01/01
- End date
- 2006/12/31
Contents |
Partners
- EPFL CH
Funding Bodies
Contact
- Achile Perternier (mailto:achille.perternier)
Objectives
The mission of the 3D Mental Vision (MVisio) project is to offer a pedagogical set of IT-utilities to clarify and simplify learning and practice of Computer Graphics and Virtual Reality. We have developed a learning platform to improve teaching and practice of Computer Graphics for beginners and advanced students. Our goal is to offer a set of tools to help students having a better mental vision of the abstract notions introduced during the course. Our platform is composed by a pedagogical-oriented, intuitive and user-friendly graphics engine, offering a powerful amount of features with an extremely easy and comfortable interface, and a set of interactive and collaborative applications to use during classes and practical works to present complex concepts in an easy and clear way. Concretely, this project consist of: • a set of compact applications (modules) allowing both students and teachers to navigate and experience 2D/3D CG notions in a user-friendly, interactive and intuitive environment. • a 2D/3D application development kit (MVisio SDK), consisting in a small, easy-to-use and pedagogical-oriented graphic engine. This SDK will be used during practical work sessions and student projects to allow users to directly deepen in the 3D without having to care about corollary (and time wasting) aspects like window management, rendering context initialization or low-level hardware acceleration interfacing.
Main Results
MVisio is a modern 2D/3D graphics engine featuring: • Extremely user-friendly API, based on an C++ class-oriented architecture • Multi-device rendering on PC, PDA and CAVE (your same sourcecode works everywhere!) • Mutli-platform (Windows, Linux) • Full OpenGL and OpenGL|ES support • Dynamic scene graph management • Dynamic lighting • Dynamic soft shadows • Bloom lighting • Vertex and pixel shaders • Skinning and animations • Particle emitters • Terrain engine • Video2texture from MPEG1/2 files • Loading of scenes directly exported from 3D Studio MAX through a specific plugin • 2D GUI system with event handling • Loading of complex 2D interfaces from XML files • Object picking • Support for Head-Mounted Displays (HMD), even on PDA • New customizable objects directly pluggable in the MVisio core
End Users
Evaluation Methodologies
MVisio has been used during the course of computer graphic and virtual reality at EPFL. It has proved very useful for presentation purpose by using the modules and also during project session giving a robust and friendly f4ramework to develop application. Evaluation methods already in the KB can be found in Category:Evaluation Methods
Publications
- A. Peternier, S. Cardin, F. Vexo, D. Thalmann, Practical Design and Implementation of a CAVE System, 2nd International Conference on Computer Graphics, Theory and Applications, GRAPP 2007, Barcelona, 2007 (.PPS)
- A. Peternier, F. Vexo, D. Thalmann, Wearable Mixed Reality System In Less Than 1 Pound, In Proc. of the 12th Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments, Lisbon, Portugal, May 2006 (.PPS)
- A. Peternier, D. Thalmann, F. Vexo, Mental Vision: a Computer Graphics teaching platform, Edutainment 2006, Hangzhou, China, April 2006, In Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag Berlin Hidelberg (.PPS)
- EuroGraphics Tutorial on Mixed Realities in Inhabited Worlds, part II-4: Hardware for Mixed Realitites in Inhabitated Worlds, co-author
- A. Peternier, Lights and Shadows in Real Time Computer Graphics, memoire, IMM-UNIL, 2004
Application & Research Areas
Technical Areas
Teaching of VR systems
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