Project Direction

I had hoped to present Virtual Midtown to some TA's this quarter. There were two expectations that I told the TA's I would follow when presenting Virtual Midtown. The first was that I did not want it to happen at the last minute. The second was that VRM would not be crappy. My intent is not to waste the TA's time.

It became apparent that even with a working JNI the state of the project from a user/student's perspective would still be not good (aka crappy). Because I would have violated both expectations to the TA's, I chose not to pursue surveying TA's and instead offer my own opinions concerning what would need to be added, before user testing could even begin.

These are general topics and suggestions that I believe would make VRM more User friendly.

1. Graphics
   Graphics need to be improved. Texture Mapping is a must and so is a better frame rate and animation. I think this goes without saying and I am pleased with the work of the people currently working on this.

2. Console Interface
   Instead of running the programming interfaces from the command line, why not create a console interface. The JNI works both ways, Java can call C functions and C functions can call Java. Why not create a console system inside the viewer where the client could enter commands such as:

   @load "demo.java"
@create-agent car
@run demo1(car)

   Where demo1 would be some java function that would move the agent created "car" around. It is my opinion that separating the Viewer and the Client is a bad idea.

3. Agents
   Better models and a better world need to be completed. Furthermore, properties/restraints/realism need to be added to agents in the world (for example: gravity).

   There also needs to be some concept of interaction between agents. If a car agent hits a person agent, the person agent should terminate it's current objective and be dead.

4. Better Viewer
   The Windows (NT and 98) Viewer needs to be kept updated (it is at the moment behind the SGI version). It also needs to be throughly user tested. It is currently a memory hog and contains some bugs.

   If each client can have multiple agents, then I think the viewer should be allowed to follow around a particualar agent. For example:

   @floor d:10 a:car

   This would follow the agent car at a distance of 10.

   It may also be nice to have a "radar" like window that displays other agents in proximity to the current agent.

5. Concept of Location
   VRM has no concept of location. It would be nice if we could write a project for students that would do depth-first (or other) searches to find a path from one point to another. Currently nothing like this is possible. I think the Midtown Alliance would also find such a feature interesting (@goto 'west peachtree' '8th Street').

   This would involve implementing a grid and some boolean functions that would answer "Can I turn left?" or "Can I turn right?"

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