10/30/02: Oral Report #1

Where I am now:

This project is a continuation of my group's ThinkQuest Imagining the Future project of last year.  It's a virtual museum that contains an archive of videoclips of major moments in modern American history--moments such as Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and Apollo 11's mission to the moon.

Last year we managed to program the museum, navigation (so the user can move around in the museum), the map (so the user can tell where he or she is in the museum), collision detection (so the user can't go through walls), and textures (so that the museum's walls, floor, and ceiling are not boring solid colors).  We also made the program recognize when the user clicks on an exhibit, which would cause the program to open a netscape window to a link which contains the video clip of the exhibit.

So far this year, I've made sure the program is still able to run (which it is) and modified the code so that it takes a screengrab every frame, which is useful for animated gifs to put on this website.

Where I plan to go:

I found out recently that you can show avi video files in OpenGL, so the plan is to make it so that when a user clicks on an exhibit, the program plays the avi rather than links to a website.  Also, I plan to expand the museum and include a memorial garden...perhaps in the courtyard.

An good idea that Ben suggested was instead of hardcoding everything (the exhibits and stuff), I could create a program that would read in a database of history video clips and put them in the museum automatically.  This would certainly make the museum easier to add exhibits to because instead of coding each new exhibit, I could just add it to a database, and the program would automatically add it to the museum.  It's an idea that deserves consideration.