The Virtual Rainforest Project

Introduction

Stage One (February to May), The Rough Draft

• Model Room 202
• Photographic textures for all walls
• Attempt to get "real" furniture models from manufacturers
• Animated Chris and Walter?
• Click on work areas to get info on their capabilities
• Include "portal" to virtual rainforest
• First draft of rainforest model
• Basic topography
• About a dozen or so different vegetation/tree models to be distributed throughout
• Some meteorological behavior - the passage of day and night, maybe rain
• Some objects "clickable" revealing text information about them
• ambient rainforest sounds
• maybe a few wildlife models with simple behaviors

Stage Two (May to August), Media embellishment

• Collect Data
• Photographs
• Birds and trees to aid model making and texturing
• Landscape shots for background texture
• Ground (soil, undergrowth) for ground texture
• Sound samples
• Bird calls - to be associated with specific bird models
• Broader spectrum of ambient sounds - night/day, river/jungle, etc...
• "Walking Loop" - sound of ground crunching/squishing underfoot to be looped wheneever user "walks"
• Meteorological - breeze in trees, rain, thunder
• Geographic
• Satellite image of area - to be used to make "fly-in" transition
• Detailed topographic model
• Other
• Any possible possible description of "HQ"
• Interesting and realistic wildlife
• Birds models
• more models, and more accurate ones
• textured with appropriate photograph
• give correct call
• Flocking behavior?
• Monkeys (or whatever) turn heads to watch passersby
• Environment more immersive
• Cycle through sunny morning, rainy afternoon, starry evening
• Sun, moon, and stars move across the sky (implemented simply by embedding them all in the surface of a hollow, rotating sphere surrounding the environment (like the old astronomy notion of the crystal sphere.)
• Rain
• Play rain sound
• Darken sky / swap in cloudy sky texture
• Encase user in transparent cylinder, upon which we use an animated texture of streaking raindrops.
• swap in raindrop rippled textures on water surfaces
• Sounds
• Associate different ambient sounds with different regions
• Different footstep sounds in different regions
• Random "other" noise played at intervals or in response to mouse clicks

Stage Three (September - December), Introducing Some Science

• Tour guide, two options (or combination of the two):
1. Media Intensive
• Guide represented by avatar at user's side
• Plays audio tracks in response to events, mouse clicks, and entering different locales
• We know ahead of time exactly what content will be included
• Can't ask probing questions
2. Text
• Queries entered at a text line at bottom of page
• Queries processed by natural language parser and submitted to database for response
• Potentially more robust than media intensive version
• More potential scientific content
• we must have a thoroughly prepared database to make this feature interesting and useful
• Interaction with persistence
• The system is "aware" of user's past
• User can drop and collect objects
• Special tools
• Look at bird through "binoculars" - a "binocular" window shows up, within which a quicktime movie of a real bird is played
• Take a "snapshot" - saves a screenshot, maybe it can be rendered at higher than normal resolution
• Place net traps - come back later, open trap, and trap window comes up with very high detail model of some bird or insect
• SCUBA diving?

Module One - Field Research Training

Module Two - Rainforest Exploration Adventure for Kids

Module Three - Shared Data Environment

Issues

• Confine the user to a "path" through the trees.  The actual geometric shape will be an arch shaped tunnel.  There will be 3D models nearby and then the walls of the tunnel are textured with the appearance of jungle in the distance.
• Keep animals at a distance.  Unless observed closely, birds can be modelled extremely simply (under 20 polys.)  Good textures buy us some free detail.  We allow birdwatching by "binoculars," popping up a new window which either contains a high poly 3D model of the bird sitting on a branch, a "canned" animation, or actual video footage
• Repeat, repeat, reapeat...  The same model, with different textures can be a dozen different birds.  Repeated instances of the same 3D object save on download and render time.

• VRML is deployable in a web browser.  All that is necessary is the Cosmo plug-in (freely available.)
• Java3D is deployable in a web browser.  However, the Java plug-in and Java Runtime Environment must be installed.  As of yet, this is not a terribly user friendly process, but it will improve.
• We may also create a "high-res" version that should not be viewed online.  Besides being more detailed (higher polygon count, higher quality media) this version will allow the user to use high end I/O devices including goggles, datagloves, and 3mice.

• It is very possible that we will be able to collaborate with the M.I.N.D. Lab on this project.  They have overlapping interests and many experienced 3D graphics artists who may want to participate.