CS174c 1998: Demo or Die

CS174c:
Demo or Die

I survived CS174 T-Shirt 1997

The third part of CS174 is project oriented. Every student chooses a project in consultation with the instructor. Classes are done seminar style with individual students discussing issues that appear in their respective projects. The goal is for all of us to learn what each individual is learning in their respective project. The requirements for the final grade are a presentation of the project at the end of the quarter with a live demo of the prototype implementation. The final presentation must be on the web and will be graded on scientific content and overall presentation quality, i.e., I don't want to see just a bunch of ascii text jammed in between html tags (see Ex1 and Ex2 for some good examples).

Below you find a list of suggestions for possible projects. Feel free to suggest one that you designed, but be prepared to argue to me why your project kicks.

Project Plans

Project Suggestions

This is a non-exclusive list of projects I believe would be interesting to explore, take a decent amount of effort to implement, and might even lead to some interesting research questions. Basically the idea is to pick stuff from recent state of the art research. Here goes:

Digital Cockroach Farm: Build and animate a hexapod. Then have a whole gang of them with group behaviors such as flocking, hunting, etc. Make it all run on the workbench as an autonomous animation. There is relevant literature in the A-life community as well as in recent Siggraph papers on flocking behavior.
Mesh Compression: Describe large meshes efficiently through Topological Surgery. Involves juicy graph algorithms. Currently the best algorithm for non-progressive mesh encoding. Can you improve on this? Potential for original research.
View Interpolation through Epipolar Morphing: Take separate images and use view morphing to create realistic inbetween images and/or use the ideas to do plenoptic image editing. High neatness factor. Don't know where this is going to lead...
Very high resolution terrain roaming: Be the first on your block to roam fluidly over a 7k by 10k sample (10m resolution) topography dataset of the Los Angeles basin. Requires mesh simplification in the regular setting. Putting this on the workbench would be a lot of fun. Chance to play with some of the neatest datasets on this planet (no kidding) and make a substantial contribution to application sciences. Come see me about papers in this direction.
Large Image Mosaics: Implement algorithms which can stitch together many images into large scale image mosaics. Think about enhancing such a viewer with depth information to do a better job at rerendering.
Weighted Mesh Simplification: Apply weighted, constrained meshing algorithms to images as a representation primitive. Neat and funky. Will lead to original research. Talk to me about details. If you know your numerical analysis, we'll solve some operators. Very high impact possibilities.
Subdivision, Wavelets and the Lifting Scheme: Create an interactive (JAVA?) toolbox for the lifting scheme and use it explore non-uniform variational subdivision and associated wavelet transforms for an interactive editing system. Potential for net.fame.