CavePainting In The Yurt

This page is a place to document the process of running CavePainting in the Yurt. This includes demo scenes, major issues, and goals.

Demo Scenes

The following scenes are useful for testing and demos:

• Jadrian's termite mound (2008)
• Dorian Barill's town scene (2008
• Dorian Barill's library scene (2008).

They include a lot of high-quality content, including text, high-resolution textures, and "largeness". We also have a vague idea of other useful scenes, but they need to be tracked down:

• a zoetrope-like scene of a bat flying (EJ Kalafarski's final project from CS137, Fall 2008)
• a swamp-like scene (Maybe Dorion Barrill's final project? Maybe Trevor O'Brien's first drawing from Fall 2008?)

A large number of scenes are archived on both the Brown CS and CCV filesystems:

• Brown CS: /research/graphics/data/cavepainting
• CCV: /gpfs/data/dhl/cavepainting/

The course materials from CS137 also are a good reference for past work:

• Web: http://cs.brown.edu/courses/csci1370/
• Brown CS: /pro/web/web/courses/cs137

The Brown CS course directory has a ton of content that's not externally available, such as movies, photos, etc .

Adding this command is useful automatically loading art for demos:

-c LoadArtwork=${absolute_path}/${name}.3DArt

Major issues

• Crashing
  • After a scene has been loaded, it will crash if the wands are not trackable. This may also cause crashes if object occlude the wands from the view of the tracker, but we haven't seen this happen.
• Loading problems
  • Textures don't seem to load. Instead, they show up as wireframes. It's not clear why this is happening, but a first test could check if new textures can be added (this would tell us if all textures are broken or just the loading).
  • Scenes load quickly the first, but it can be very slow to load subsequent scenes. This is probably due to the high overhead of deleting objects in cavepainting. This problem seems like a crash, as the scene stops updating, but with enough time it should eventually start running again with the newly loaded scene.
• Interaction problems
  • Currently keyboard input doesn't work. John says the linux vrg3d server has some issues with keyboards, and the windows server has some stability problems (but keyboard access is okay). This is probably something that can be fixed with come configuration. Ultimately, we'll want a wireless keyboard for use inside the yurt.

• Hard coded paths
  • Some 3DArt files refer to absolute paths from the Granoff Cave. Our current workaround is to create those expected files on the cave filesystem. For example, "final_town.3DArt" looks for this file:

/share/cs137/dollar-g-cs137/tools/linux/data/cavepaintings/dbarill/brushtips_dorion.jpg

which we copied from dbarill's user directory to the above path. We have write access to "/share/c137", so we can add more files as needed, as long as they're in that part of the tree.

Debugging tips

List the image files used by a 3DArt file:

strings vortexblue.3DArt | grep 'jpg\|JPG\|png\|PNG' | sort | uniq

Goals

• All old scenes files working and no major issues!
• Menu and Interface usable for students in CS137
• Examples of high resolution textures and large scenes that show off the resolution of the cave