Teaching and Learning Archives ⋆ Page 4 of 4 ⋆ X-Reality: University of Michigan XR

July 19, 2013August 25, 2020

The 3D Production Pipeline: Teleporter Troubles Animation

In the Fall, students were invited to participate in an immersive year-long course on 3D animation called The 3D Production Pipeline. The course was co-taught by Elona Van Gent (Stamps School of Art & Design) and Duderstadt Center’s Eric Maslowski, Steffen Heise & Stephanie O’Malley. Students with varying levels of experience constructed their concept, characters, storyboards and renderings, tirelessly working together to create a short animated feature called Teleporter Troubles, which follows the (mis)adventures of Wesley, a shy, smart blogger who is convinced he can use a teleporter to make an important date— meeting his girlfriend’s parents for the first time.

Concept art of Wesley, star of Teleporter Troubles

By combining the talents and resources of The Stamps School of Art & Design and the Duderstadt Center, students were able to create high-quality work in an innovative and collaborative space using state-of-the-art technology. To begin their process, students first drew concept art (what they imagined theircharacters, sets, and props would look like), many using Wacom tablets to capture the gesture and style of hand-drawing. From there, they used Maya for modeling the individual components, ZBrush to add detail to the models, and 3D Studio Max to put it all into motion! In 3D Studio Max, students adjusted the ‘rigs’ of their components to make them move and behave as they wanted. A rig is the skeletal structure of an animated object (much like the connected parts of a marionette puppet) that animators manipulate to create the desired posture or facial expressions of their characters. Because the class required copious amounts of teamwork to create one animation, students and professors used TeamLab, an online resource for file sharing and messaging, allowing students to upload their work and discuss their ideas in one convenient place online. The use of this software enabled students to animate professionally and communicate efficiently. (For more details on the teamwork involved and the exhausting creative process of animating, visit Play Gallery’s post on the project.)

Teleporter Troubles was created over the course of a year by the following team of students:
Zoe Allen-Wickler, Ashley Marie Allis, J’Vion Armstrong, Ashley Boudrie, Stephanie Boxold, Anna Jonetta Brown, Jaclyn Caris, Emily Cedar, Annie Cheng, John Foley, Paris London Glickman, Molly Lester, Rich Liverance, Lonny Marino, Olivia Meadows, Thabiso O Mhlaba, Maggie Miller, Kaisa Ryding and Sarah Schwendeman.

Finalized models of architectural elements.

April 17, 2013August 26, 2020

Test Driving with FAAC and Graphics Performance Discussion

FAAC Incorporated provides system engineering and software products including driving simulators for commercial and private training. FAAC reached out to the Duderstadt Center to share information and to compare their system performance to the MIDEN’s capabilities. The Duderstadt Center had developed an “urban neighborhood” model as a stress test: how big and highest number of triangles and vertices can we make the models while still maintaining a comfortable interactive frame-rate in the MIDEN? The demo showed the MIDEN’s system capabilities and potential. The Duderstadt Center proceeded to visit FAAC’s space and saw the first 6-DOF full-motion system in a mobile trailer.

January 6, 2013September 30, 2020

AnnArbor.com – St. Paul’s Ancient Letters Available for Perusal

From AnnArbor.com:

You can now hold one of University of Michigan’s most valuable possessions in your hands.

Well, sort of.

Thirty of the rarest, earliest leaves of the Epistles of St. Paul, dating from 180 to 220 AD, have been digitized and turned into an interactive app usable on iPhones and iPads.

“What’s especially important is the direct experience with the ancient world,” Arthur Verhoogt, acting archivist of the library’s papyrology collection, said of the app, called PictureIt: EP.

“History is nice to read about but it’s much more important to be able to touch history.”

The collection of letters, known to scholars as Papyrus 46, is believed to be the oldest known surviving copy of the Letters of St. Paul. Out of the 104 page collection, 30 leaves reside here in Ann Arbor, 56 leaves reside at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin and 18 are lost. A leaf is made up of two pages of a book.

The new app, prepared by the Digital Media Commons 3-D Lab at U-M, allows users to flip through the letters as they would a book.

Read the Full Article

January 5, 2013September 30, 2020

Wayfinding in Assisted Living Homes

Rebecca Davis, professor and researcher at the Grand Valley State University, received a research grant from the National Institute of Health to research how patients with Alzheimers disease navigate their living space. Assisted living homes can be drab or nondescript with long hallways adding to the confusion and frustration for those living in these homes. To research this problem and possible solutions, Davis recruited 40 people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and 40 without the disease to virtually walk through a simulation of an actual assisted living home in the MIDEN. Staff and students at the Duderstadt Center modeled a 3D environment to re-create details such as the complicated lighting or maze-like hallways, to create a natural and immersive experience. This allows users to fully experience how the color schemes, lighting, and wall detail can affect the experience of living in the home. Various “visual cues” are placed throughout the space at key locations to determine if these help the subject in remembering which paths lead to where they need to go. Rebecca currently utilizes two environments in her study, one with visual cues and one without. Subjects are shown the path they must go to reach a destination and then given an opportunity to travel there themselves-if they can remember how.

December 21, 2012June 29, 2022

PictureIt: Epistles of Paul Released on iTunes

Get the App!

Welcome to the world of second century C.E. Egypt. This app will allow you to leaf through pages of the world’s oldest existing manuscript of the letters of St. Paul (P.Mich.inv.6238, also known in NT scholarship as P46). Thirty leaves of this manuscript, written in about 200 C.E., were found in Egypt and purchased by the University of Michigan Papyrology Collection in 1931 and 1933 (another 56 leaves, not included in this app, are housed in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin; 18 leaves are missing completely).

The app will give you the feel of what it was like reading an ancient Greek book on papyrus, where the text is written without word division, punctuation, headings, or chapter and verse numbers. To aid the reader without knowledge of ancient Greek the translation mode will give a literal translation of the Greek text preserved on these pages (with addition of chapter and verse numbers), with explanatory notes showing where this text is different from the Standard text.

June 30, 2012September 30, 2020

SCI-Hard Mobile Game

Those with spinal cord injuries (SCI), often males ages 15-25, encounter a drastically different world when they are released from the hospital. With varying degrees of disability, mobility and function, the world around them becomes a collection of physical and mental challenges which is a complete departure from their previous lifestyles. Whether they are in crutches or manual/automatic wheelchairs, they need to learn mobility, scheduling, and social tasks once again. Stairs may now be an unsurmountable obstacle. The individual may receive glaring looks from others on the street or be taunted by children. Daily activities often surround the scheduling of their colostomy bag. The list goes on.

This project was initially the conceptualization of several ideas for a complete “manual” to be used by health care professionals working with individuals with SCI. It has since been turned into a larger development effort which has recently been funded by the U.S. Department of Education. This extension of the project would involve the development of a game which teaches those with SCI the necessary skills they need to now learn in a fun, edgy way. Tasks such as scheduling, mobility, and social interaction all become elements of the game as the player builds up their character’s abilities and opens up new locations and mini-games they can do.

June 20, 2012November 3, 2020

A Ferry called “Wahoo”

A passenger ferry was designed by a student team from the Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering Schools, for both their final project and the Puget Sound. The vessel, named Wahoo, is 57 meters long, 18 meters wide, and seats 350 passengers with a top speed of 45 knots. The students modeled the ferry in Rhinoceros and worked with the Duderstadt Center to print the model in plaster for presentation purposes. They also exported VRML for visualization in the MIDEN, allowing them to explore the ferry. Although Wahoo is much larger than the MIDEN, the students were able to see it in immersive stereo at full scale, allowing them to directly observe and evaluate sizes and clearances.

The engine room was an especially detailed design. The students obtained the real marine engine model from MTU Detroit Diesel (in STP format) and placed three instances of it in their vessel.

May 19, 2009September 30, 2020

Back Pain Is Not A Game (Except When It Is)

BackQuack, a recently released video game, lets gamers play the best or worst doctor. By joining a “good” or “evil” clinics, players can win points and accolades or prison time. The player can fill the role of doctor or patient, learning about our health care system along the way. Players (in the “patient” role) can even enter their own information to learn more about back pain specific to them. Developed by the Duderstadt Center with Dr. Andrew Haig and funding from the Center for Healthcare Research and Transformation, the game is part of a multimedia package that includes pamphlets, books, and events–all with the purpose of teaching people about the real causes of backpain and best treatment practices.

March 13, 2009September 30, 2020

Virtual Disaster Simulator

Mass casualty scenarios are inherently dangerous with many risks to those on site. Subjecting novices to such scenarios prematurely could lead to additional risks or dangers due to inexperience and poor decision making. Additionally, such scenarios are often far too expensive to replicate at any complexity or scale that mimics the real world. For example, staging a training scenario that faithfully recreates the 9/11 events would be a production that rivals blockbuster Hollywood movies as fire, smoke, debris, victims are all staged and coordinated. Even then one would begin to introduce additional dangers to the trainee and eliminate the possibility of trainees having *exactly* the same scenario unfold before them.

This project is an extension of earlier work done for the CDC and Department of Homeland Security in which first responders were trained for a specific disaster scenario to great effect. The focus of this revision was to target the needs of the Emergency Medicine residency program while also making significant advances in visual quality and immersion. It became important for trainees to identify wounds quickly and effectively. Advanced shaders were used to allow for a greater amount of detail per surface so the details of burns and lacerations could be realized. Additionally, advanced skeletally animated characters were also introduced to allow for full articulation of characters.

The project was a large success as the related studies showed the simulator was just as effective at training residents as using standardized patients.
Additionally, the project was recently featured on the Big Ten Network as part of the “Blue in Brief” segments.

March 2, 2001September 30, 2020

Virtual Football Trainer

Imagine watching the U-M football team playing in a sold out Michigan Stadium on a sunny Saturday afternoon. But instead of cheering from the bleachers, you are being transposed right down to the field next to the quarterback. You are in the middle of the action. You can move to any position and experience the game from the player’s point of view. You feel like being a participant, no longer a spectator.

The technology of immersive virtual reality makes this amazing scenario possible. as you are fully surrounded by the virtual players on the field, the players are presented in full scale and in stereo. It seems that you can touch them. You can look and walk around, hover over the quarterback, or even fly to cover distances quickly.

The simulation of football plays in immersive virtual reality has a most useful and very promising application in the training of football players for specific aspects of a game. The University of Michigan Virtual Reality Laboratory has developed the concept for such a “Virtual Football Trainer” and has implemented a demo version that illustrates the potential in an already convincing way.

The original idea for the Virtual Football Trainer was inspired by the Lloyd Carr, head football coach at the University of Michigan. Generous funding for the development of the system came from the Graham Foundation and equipment support from Silicon Graphics Inc. The Michigan football staff provided continuous guidance and valuable expertise for the design and implementation of the Virtual Football Trainer.

Original Project Page: Virtual Football Trainer