Team VT – Newsletter

2-3-12

The foundation has finally been established between all participants in this enormous undertaking. Team VT met with the three architecture students, Richman, John and Dan to discuss our plans for implementation and transfer of files from their group to ours. Cintia and Siddhesh worked with the ETC IT department to get our server set up along with the Unity asset server to begin compiling the individual projects that they and Sun-moon have been developing for the past three weeks. Our adviser John Dessler and I met Wednesday with Dave Bear, Richman and members of the High Point Pittsburgh committee. Throughout the hour long meeting many ideas were circulated among the group that as a whole envision an outstanding finished product. It is great to see that everyone is just as excited as we are to finally realizing our client’s goals.

We have launched a Twitter feed for fans and followers of this project to keep up to date on everything we are doing throughout the semester. Follow @HighPointPGH for more information. This Twitter account will be used for guests to tweet about their experience, give feedback or follow up questions after they have completed the virtual tour. To learn more about the process of Gigapans and the hopeful implementation of these images Paul Heckbert will be joining Team VT and Dave Bear to shoot a panorama from the roof of the Entertainment Technology Center, pending allowance of course. Siddhesh has been working hard to make practical and efficient use of the quadtree system to load these extremely large Gigapan images in real time.

As we move forward we have our first round of process and project grading coming up on February 17^th in which the faculty of the ETC will be stopping by the project room to review the material we have gathered and the prototype we have developed up to that point.

This coming week the team will meet with the architecture students to discuss interior design plans and cover the innovative use of architectural technologies throughout the space. One form of interaction we have discussed is creating an interactive cross section to show various materials used in the insulation, energy production and the reuse of water. Our Unity assets will be combined and formatted for the web and launched by Friday the 10^th. In this stage guests will be able to log in, ride the elevator and tour the space freely albeit it without textures or much functionality other than walk and look controls.

More information will be available online at our website, etc.cmu.edu/projects/highpoint, and the High Point Pittsburgh Facebook page.