This is a system for automatic path planning of walking avatars in very large 3D virtual environments. My role was implementing the global path planning algorithm, which builds a road map of the environment through random sampling coupled with a pruning strategy. This is done as a preprocess. At runtime this road map is searched for a collision free path between user specified start and goal locations. 

The project involved developing  a new approach to motion planning for rigid and articulated objects in static or dynamic environments. The approach involves converting the motion planning problem into a constrained physics simulation. Both hard and soft constraints are defined to guide the object to its goal, while maintaining valid motion. Running the simulation produces a path for the robot from its starting position to its goal in real time. This work was done for my research assistantship in the Gamma group.

This system uses a hardware accelerated method for computing a 3D Voronoi graph of a scene to derive an estimated path for a robot from its starting position to its goal. My role in the project involved extending the system to support articulated robots and also improving robot orientation using potential fields.
 

Under Prof. Wolfgang Stuerzlinger, I implemented a tracking system to allow multi-user interaction with a virtual environment using laser pointers. The project involved using video capture in DirectX  to obtain images of the area where the laser pointers would be. These frames of video were filtered and then analyzed, using a simple blob detection algorithm, to find the locations of any laser pointer dots in the frame. The tracking system used a 2nd degree polynomial approximation to predict the position of each laser pointer spot, to localize the search. We then experimented with pulsing the laser pointers, using controlled output from the computer's parallel port, so that multiple laser pointers could interact with the system, and always be uniquely identified.
 
 

Under Prof. Walter Whitely I studied the projective geometry and Grassman algebra with applications to the study of rigid structures in the 2D and 3D.