Press: Summer course project's app release party on Monday - WRAL

Raleigh greenway iPhone app set for release

Beginning Monday, residents can navigate the city of Raleigh's nature trails with an iPhone app.

Press: more reports about our mobile course's CityCamp successes

via opensource.com

News: Students in summer mobiles course excel at CityCamp Raleigh and win $5000 prize

Students learn more when they apply their new skills with real clients. To find clients for students in this summer's interdisciplinary Mobile App Design course, we sent them to CityCamp Raleigh. In the end, they far exceeded our expectations. Perhaps even their own!

(Image courtesy CityCamp)

CityCamp events use new technologies to engage citizens and make their governments more transparent. In the week or so leading up to the Raleigh event, our students brainstormed ideas, identified particularly promising ones, and developed them into pitches. The four projects we brought to CityCamp were:

• R Greenway
• Raleigh Retold
• Looking Back on Raleigh
• CitySeek Raleigh

On Friday June 1, we listened while government, business and technical leadership spoke about the the impact technology could have on governments and communities. On Saturday, over 30 attendees lined up to pitch their ideas for one minute each. Organizers selected 25 of these for further development, including all of our students'. Through Saturday and Sunday, attendees lengthened and refined their pitches, often developing prototype apps. At 3pm on Sunday, ten teams, including all of our student teams, pitched their ideas for five minutes. The organizers met to choose the five top projects, and the team that would win at $5000 prize. We did amazingly well:

• 1st place and $5000 to the R Greenway team
• 2nd place to Raleigh Retold
• 4th place to CitySeek Raleigh

A big congratulations to all of our students! You found collaborators, brought a lot of creative energy to CityCamp, and will make a big difference to Raleigh and its citizens.
To stay up to date with our course projects, visit our course's project site. You can learn more about CityCamp and how our students did there in these press reports:

• At the Raleigh Public Record
• At WRAL TV

Course: Advanced Computer Graphics for Game Engines

CSC 591
Advanced Computer Graphics for Game Engines

The realism race in interactive graphics continues apace. How do the designers and engineers at gaming companies such as Epic and EA create such amazing visual simulations? Take this course to find out how, and to prepare yourself for working with and extending their technology, whether in the gaming industry itself, or in any of the many new fields in which it is being applied.

Instructor:
Ben Watson, Associate Professor, Computer Science

Content and structure:
This course is an introduction to advanced graphics techniques used in computer game engines. Students will learn about game engines, spatial hierarchy, collision detection, physics, animation, lighting and shader programming. Guest experts from the RTP gaming community, including companies such as Epic Games and Sparkplug Games, will provide real world context.

This is a mixed format course that includes lectures, readings, student presentations, lab work and a significant programming project that occupies roughly half of the semester. The course will meet twice a week. The first day each week will be dedicated to lecture, while the second will be a reading, discussion and lab day: student presentation and discussion of readings, of current assignment or project state, and bootstrapping lab work.

Prerequisites:
562 (introductory graphics) or equivalent


Schedule:
Spring 2012, MoWe 1250 to 205p

Course: visual interfaces for mobile devices

CSC 495
Visual Interfaces for Mobile Devices

Mobiles are the future

• Today's phones have as much processing power as the original Xbox 
• There are over 5 billion mobile subscribers worldwide, 3/4 of those are in developing nations 
• Nearly two billion phones were sold worldwide in 2010, vs. only 350 million PCs 
• Mobile sales are growing 10x faster than PC sales 

To succeed in that future, you need to know how to 

• Build mobile apps 
• Create graphics for mobiles 
• Create effective mobile interfaces 
• Work in teams 

Our course is designed to give you those skills

Instructor:
Ben Watson, Associate Professor, Computer Science

Content:
This course is an intensive introduction to the design and development of mobile interfaces and applications. By the course's end, student teams will design and build an interactive mobile app prototype for platforms such as iOS (iPhone, iPad) and Android (Nexus, Galaxy Tab). Along the way, students will learn mobile design technique, including ideation, rapid prototyping, and evaluation; and mobile technology, including hardware, usage environment, graphics, interfaces and programming. Guest experts from the RTP interaction design community, such as Allscripts, IBM and Epic Games will provide real world context.

Prerequisites:
CSC students: CSC 316

Schedule:
Spring 2012, MW 350p-505p

Enroll now!

Meet: on using mechanical turk to perform visualization experiments

Hey folks,

Last time we met and finished our discussion of this paper

Louis Bavoil. 2011. Multi-View Soft Shadows. NVIDIA white paper.

This week, we'll read and discuss a great paper by Heer from Stanford:

Heer & Bostock. 2010. Crowdsourcing Graphical Perception: Using Mechanical Turk to Assess Visualization Design. Proc. ACM CHI.

We'll probably follow this with some skims and spots.

See you soon, 

Ben.

Meet: real time soft shadows using area light sources

Hey folks,

Because so many of us are in the required 600 course right before our lab meeting, we are pushing back our lab meeting time to 330p Fridays.

We will meet today. Please make sure to come if you can to our meetings, even if I'm not able to post something about the meeting beforehand.

Today we'll talk about an nvidia white paper I ran across from March 2011, which represents a significant advance in soft shadowing: 

Louis Bavoil. 2011. Multi-View Soft Shadows. NVIDIA white paper. Louis also has his own web page.

We will probably also spot and skim a bit as well.

Best,

Ben