09/10/02: Hastily Getting Organized

I've got the website up!  What more do you want of me?!?  But seriously, I've been considering my tech lab project for a while now, and I decided that I wanted to do a variation of my group's Imagine the Future project from last year.  I've got two ideas for it:

A Continuation of Portal to the Past

One of my ideas was just to expand on the virtual museum of historical films that we started last year.  This would require a whole lot of research.  I'm not that happy with the way we displayed the video files in our project--we had it link to a website that contained all the videos, but it would only work in the Linux system--nowhere else.  I'd have to research a way to have the program actually play the video file, which may or may not be possible.  We tried to find a way last year and got nowhere. 

I'd also have to add corridors and such to the museum and figure out how I'd want to structure the museum.  For example, should I have one corridor for war-related films, one for popular culture-related films, one for inventions and scientific innovations, etc?  Or should I just make it one long hallway as a chronological walk through time?  I'd also have to gather historic videos.  I have the software to convert a VHS tape into a video file, but that would mean I'd have to keep an eye on the History Channel.  I could also look for a bunch of links to video files.

Finally, the last problem that I can think of right now that I'd have to figure out is how to provide information about the historical significance of the video in the program.  For example, last year, we had a video file of the Hindenberg Explosion, and as you can see from the website, we included the video as well as a paragraph-long description.  I'd have to figure out how to duplicate that in the program since there really wouldn't be enough room for both the video and the description on the screen.  This a lot of research and work, but I thought of another idea for a tech lab project which has the same premise, but a different focus.

A History of Physics

This is sort of combining my interests: Physics and Computer Science.  I was thinking of making a virtual museum--same OpenGL code as the Portal to the Past project--but having it focus on physics principles or the history of physics rather than actual history.  For example, I was thinking of having different corridors for the different branches of physics: one hallway for Newtonian Physics, one hallway for the Maxwell equations pertaining to Electricity and Magnetism, one hallway for Einstein's theory of general relativity, one for Quantum Mechanics, etc.

In addition to explaining the basics of each of branches, I could program simulators for each of the principles, sort of like the projectile program at the beginning of Supercomp, only animated and with actual planets and/or suns. 

It's a great deal more complicated than the Portal to the Past, and I probably wouldn't even get up to rotational kinematics by the end of the year, but it seems kind of interesting.  I would definitely have to brush up on my physics, though, so physics links would be very helpful, as well as algorithms for some of the more complicated physics concepts that I'd have to simulate.

Both ideas require a lot OpenGL savvy, so I guess my plan for the next couple of weeks is to gain madskills in OpenGL programming...and decide what I'm actually going to do. 

Now before I depress myself with all the stuff I have to do, I think I'll take the time to say that I've finished Assignment #1 (the website, obviously) and Assignment #2 (the About Me section).  Yay me!  Until tomorrow, where I shall have absolutely nothing else done, I'm sure. =)