The Way Home!

CAP6930 Virtual Environment        Final Project                  Dec. 2005

Project Overview

(Download pdf)

Christmas is here, the holy season, the homing season.  When everybody is looking forward to going back home, we’re honored to present this game; we are bringing you the homing feeling right here right now.  

　

Let’s try our best to build up a road back home together, and make this home dream come true.  Everyone is welcome to play on our newly designed game table and the most important thing – HAVE FUN for this holiday season!

Photos

Highlights

Easy Object Tracking: Low budget but well performed user tracking is the biggest highlight of this project.

Multimedia Environment: The game provides the players an interesting multimedia virtual environment.

Cooperation: The potential of cooperation multiple players brings more fun for the game.

Innovations

The game idea is innovated from a classic game, Pipedream.  The game rule of Pipedream is simple enough - try to connect the pipes as many as possible to make the water run through them.  We borrowed the basic rules from Pipedream, and put additional obstacles, destinations and operations in our game engine.

The technical idea is to show how much we can do with the low budget device to develop a virtual environment game.  Tracking problem is the most important thing to any virtual environment, and that's why we want to develop a game that can bring out the most from our most common device, such as a Webcam, which may be already owned by most of computer consumer.

Novel Equipment and Technology

Plasma Display, Props, Webcam Tracking, and Cooperation Technology.

        Plasma Display                                Webcam

                        Props (markers)

Screen Shots 

    Stages: (click to see larger image)

    Construction:

    Result:

                                                Success!

                                                Fail...   

    3D Objects

   Road models:

           

    Other Objects:

Future work:

Due to the time limit, we couldn't go as far as we hoped.  More various stages and different goals for each stage may add more fun to the game.  For example, may be in certain stage, there will occasionally generate ground of sand in the map which doesn’t permit to be built on.  Or after the game beginning for a while, a sudden floodwater will start to flow eastward from the west map edge.  In order to make it more interesting, we could include the concepts of money.  To build a road, you have to pay a certain amount of money.  We also could set a marker for shop, when the camera detects it, the game will pause for a while and you can spend money to buy a certain type of road.  What’s more, we can also set a second player either to compete with the first player.  May be he has another starting point and builds his own way home.  The game goal could be changed to who will be the first back home.  After the player back home, we could provide a 3D animation of celebrating.

Group Member

Young In Yeo, Graduate Student

Po Hu, Graduate Student

Jianwei Gao, Graduate Student

Selected Publications

[1] Hiroshi Ishii, Eran Ben-Joseph, John Underkoffler, Luke Yeung, Dan Chak, Zahra Kanji, Ben Piper. "Augmented Urban Planning Workbench: Overlaying Drawings, Physical Models and Digital Simulation," ismar, p. 203,  International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR'02),  2002.

[2] Gerhard Fischer, Ernesto Arias, Hal Eden, Andrew Gorman, and Eric Scharff: Transcending the Individual Human Mind-- Creating Shared Understanding through Collaborative Design, ACM Transaction on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) Vol. 7, No. 1, March 2000, pp. 84 - 113.

[3] Fjeld, M., N. Ironmonger, F. Voorhorst, M. Bichsel and M. Rauterberg (1999): Camera Control in a Planar, Graspable Interface. In M.H. Hamza (ed.): Proceedings of the Seventeenth IASTED International Conference Applied Informatics. Anaheim/Calgary/Zurich: ACTA Press, pp. 242–245.

For More Information:

Email:

Young In Yeo, yiyeo@cise.ulf.edu

Po Hu, phu@cise.ufl.edu

Jianwei Gao, jgao@cise.ufl.edu

University of Florida,

CISE Department,

Gainesville, Florida 32611