Open House at CAVI

WOW, I was at an open-house event at CAVI today,. CAVI is shot for ” Centre for Advanced Visualisation and Interaction” and it was an incredible cool place with lots of toys for a gfx guy.


The Holobench at CAVIThey have this thing called the “Holobench” which is two screens in an L shape where the image is projected in a way that enables you percieve the depth in the virtual word when you wear certain glasses. I was really amazing, they used this model of a phone and we could reach out and seperate it with special “joysticks”, and we could zoom it and move it around.


The 3D stereo Panorama at CAVIAnother thing they had was this large curved panoramic screen which was lit by three independent projecters. As with the holobench they made this stereoeffect so that you, with the right glasses, could percieve depth. They showed some demos on it. amongst them were a “real” scene style demo with tunnels and all. It was a great experience to fly through that tunnel. Although I like a well-programmed tunneleffect it’s nothing against what I experienced in the panorama, I was actually flying through it:)

All in all it was a great experience and since CAVI is connected to the uni I’m sure I’ll be hanging around there some more in the future. I talked to a guy which has been a student volunteer at SIGGRAPH 2001 and he encouraged me to volunteer for next years SIGGRAPH, I even got some cool pins and all :). I’m really interested and I think it would be a great experience, but the deadline for volunteering is not until february so I’ll think about it for a while. The next event for me is ofcourse The Party 2001 – Digitally Remastered, I’m looking forward to it as always, I just hope that the gamers will stay in hall 2/3 where they belong this year. Last year I sat just infront of a busfull of 15-17 year olds playing CS, that sucked .

Well, I really need to get some dinner now, see ya.

The Quake 2 BSP loader

My time is sparse these days since I have to do a lot of math stuff for uni and I’m working on two projects at the moment, the first project is a demo which I’ll be making with a finnish guy (and perhaps some outside help for gfx and sound), we’ve just finished drafting the most important parts of out soon-to-be demoengine, the “script ” to the demo is nearly finished as well so it’s time to start coding soon :) The deadline for the design stuff is set at the 11th november so time is getting sparse.

My other project is the q2loader I posted a screenshot from in my last newspost. I’ve now coded functions that successfully loads all the required textures from the .wal files (an easy task really, it’s a simple fileformat), now I just have to implement the actualy BSP/PVS instead of the method I’m currently using (which is just throwing the edges at opengl as lines). But I’ve decided to do this BSP thingy right since it’s a new technique for me (quite different from the octrees I used in my landscape engine), so I’ll build a simple 2d bsp tree compiler/renderer and expand it to 3d using a very simple world. I could most likely had implemented the BSP stuff in the q2loader anyways but I would like to be 100% sure of what I’m doing, I’m sure you can follow me here, too many ppl implement algorithms nowadays without knowing how they work. (I’m guilty as well, but it’s time to change it.

Oh, and I would like to say thanks to NeHe for adding a link to this site on his homepage. Although he states that it’s my “new” site I would like to point out to new visitors that it has been up for well over a year now.