Student research opportunities

Virtual Sydney Rocks in the Unity game engine.

Project Code: CECS_1033

This project is available at the following levels:
CS single semester, Honours, Masters

Keywords:

Virtual reality; software engineering

Supervisor:

Dr Henry Gardner

Outline:

The Virtual Sydney Rocks (VSR) project is a record of European settlement in the Rocks district, Sydney Cove, from the earliest times of European settlement until the present day. The project visualises the results of several archaeological excavations of the site and it presents a timeline of settlement over more than 200 years in a way that users can interact and experience historical change. Buildings and landscapes for the project have been created using Autodesk Maya and the models have then been imported into 3DVIA Virtools.

This project will be concerned with porting VSR into the Unity game engine. The principal task will be to develop an appropriate architecture to synchronise time and to manage model resources in the system. If time allows, this project will also look into the implementation of web interfaces and/or interactive exploratory games. There could be scope to consider porting of this simulation to a virtual reality headset such as the Occulus Rift.

This project is to be supervised together with Kit Devine (Kit.Devine@anu.edu.au) from the ANU School of Art. It is planned to be run in Semester 1, 2015. Contact the supervisors for further details.

Goals of this project

This project will address the following questions: can the immersiveness of the Virtual Sydney Rocks simulation be increased using the custom affordances and gamification available in APIs such as Unity?

Requirements/Prerequisites

The project is planned to be run in Semester 1,2015, but is not yet finalised. Contact the supervisors for further details.

Contact: