2. Student Working on the Project (RA)

The project aims at research, development, and demo of an open-source 3-D simulation engine for visualization of virtual universe. The description is given below: Existing research has shown that numerous high-performance techniques exist for displaying vast, detailed 3-D terrains. Techniques also exist to render photorealistic forests of thousands of trees very efficiently. With some additional work, adaption enables such technologies to be applied spherically (as 3-D planets). Unfortunately, most of these techniques exist only on paper or as limited tech-demos. As of today, no readily available libraries exist that are powerful enough to render a vast yet detailed universe in real-time. For this project, we propose to research and develop a simple open-source 3-D simulation engine. Unique in contrast to existing real-time engines, this engine’s key feature is the visualization of a virtual universe of vast proportion: up to roughly one billion planets and stars. Each planet contains millions of square miles of fully detailed terrain, each potentially populated with trees, plants, rocks, and other objects; or planets with just rocky surfaces without life forms. We plan to include the following features:- A robust and cleanly designed architecture designed for concurrency.- Built-in threaded loading and unloading of data from storage media.- Synchronization system managing a dynamically hot-loaded virtual universe across multiple subsystems: graphics, physics, audio.- Full implementation of star rendering.- Basic integration of virtual planetary terrain, planetary vegetation, and other objects. Later work can add and improve features and as desired (such as visualization of gaseous planets). C++ will be used to implement this engine, in combination with the OpenGL API for 3-D graphics. Direct calls to OpenGL, however, will be hidden within an abstraction layer to enable easy portability for platforms requiring different APIs (RSX/DirectX/etc.)