Project proposals
Building gadgets and robots in Second Life (www.secondlife.com)
Second life is a 3D world in which all contents is designed and build
by the players, who are each represented by an "avatar". It is a great
platform for playing with 3D graphics, texturing, and scripts. In
addition, the interface to the client is open source, and there is a
.Net interface that allow you to build robots whose behaviour is
controlled through a .Net program.
I am willing to supervise most projects that has scripting and
programming as its main topic, ranging from simple scripting projects
to master-thesis projects. In addition, students of all study programs
are wellcomed, we set the ambition according to background.
Some project ideas:
- Teleportation devices, which take you from one place to an other in an instant.
- Discount engine - one can buy stuff in second life - if you buy a lot in one shop, you might want to give a rebate
- Build a tree that grows from an acorn - will be a blast with the wood elves
- Animated weather of Denmark - it is possible to access external
web-pages from within SL. Build an animation that shows the weather
over Denmark - or parts thereof - based on information from DMI.dk
- There is a simple physics engine and collision support in SL. It is hence possible to make simple games in SL.
- Anything else :-) If you have an idea you should like to realize, send me an email, and lets see if it makes sense.
- There is a Ruby for .Net under development. Programming either a
robot or a simple script is based strongly on event driven programming.
Using continuations, it should be possible to simplify many programs.
This thesis proposal is therefore to develop a ruby version of the .Net
interface to second life scripting or client programming.
- Anything else you can think of - I have some experience in most part of SL, and am game for learning the rest.
Software documentation tools – Eclipse plugin
Tools such as JavaDoc allow one to write simple pre/post condition
documentation for Java, which is an absolute must. However, JavaDoc and
other documentation tools fails to provide a good way to document
architectural level aspects. Also, cross cutting aspects of the code
are hard to document because they in there nature does not belong a
single place in the code. In addition, some of the overall aspects of
code is best described in terms of class or interaction diagrams rather
than code. This proposal is to build an extension to the Eclipse
framework which will allow developers to write and maintain such
documentation. It is supposed to be simple to use, and to provide
benefit to the developers. I have a lot of relevant academic literature
on this topic, and you must supplement with learning Eclipse.... :-)
Project proposals related to the SASP course spring 2008
- Use of continuations in webservers. We briefly looked at that in
the course, but here I suggest to dive in and understand it in detail.
And to make an assesment of the performance characteristics of such a
solution.
- Dissect a debugger. We can look at the debugging interface to Java, or dissect the Smalltalk debugger.
- Build a Java version of the Squeak "find method" (the tool in
which you write an example input/output and it suggest methods that
give that result).
- As always, your suggestions are better than mine.