This afternoon, folks from UNC, NC State, UNC Asheville, and Duke met to talk about common interests in visualization tools such as the Unity3d game engine.
Everyone discussed current projects and ideas, and some common threads were found:
Mapping GIS and DEM (digital elevation models) into environments such as Unity.
Integration of mobile devices and sensors to create hybrid environments for augmented reality and other applications.
Integration of real-world media into environments, along with annotations.
WiiMote and WiiFit as user interaction.
Game engines combined with dome and stereo environments.
This is an informal group, but we hope to trade notes, ideas, and code as projects evolve! Here’s a shot of the group meeting in the Social Computing Room, along with remote participants via the Vidyo system at RENCI.
The application of game technology to teaching, training, and research has been a topic of interest at RENCI@UNC. More specifically, the adaptation of game engines and 3D environments to the specialized visualization environments at the engagement center is a promising area for experimentation and collaboration.
Last summer, though the UNC Games4Learning initiative, RENCI@UNC researched many of the available game development platforms, presenting the results at a Games4Learning event. Of the evaluated game engines, RENCI took interest in the Unity3D platform, recently released for Windows. Several groups from both UNC and NC State are planning to get together to compare notes, and to collaboratively explore the capabilities and applications of these tools. On Wednesday, June 3rd, at 1:30PM, this group will meet at ITS Manning to explore some of the possibilities. If anyone else is interested in Unity, or the application of game engine technology in immersive dome and 3D environments, just drop us a line.
We very recently obtained copies of Unity, and have been working through some of the basics. One of the first activities was to create specialized code to show Unity-built 3D environments in our Global Immersion dome system. This was successfully accomplished with a good bit of code-hacking to render the proper camera views and viewports for the four channel dome system. There are some known issues with the Windows stand-alone viewer that we were able to work around. We did some imaginative manipulation of the Unity Plug-in using a browser embedded within a WPF application that allows arbitrary screen resolutions, as well as spanning across multiple displays. Look for a post later with some technical details.
Here’s a video of Unity3D in the dome…
(Ed note…We had some video problems, but the link finally works).
