iCampus
EOH 2K1

This year, MacWarriors is extending upon it's wildly succesful EOH '98 Project. We are enhancing our VR tour of the campus in multiple directions.

Overview

We turned the VR tour of the campus into a VR walkthrough of campus. After mapping the North Quad in 3D, we put the map file into the Quake 1 Engine. Since Quake 1 is open source, we were able to take the code and enhance it by adding cubical QTVR support. You are able to walk up to cetain places and see an actual picture of the campus at that location.

How does it work (i.e., how do I play?)

You'll start out in North Campus, armed with a pro-illini metal sign. You can walk around in this environment, and that's cool enough, but every so often you will come across a Panorama Circle. Stepping onto this will pop open a Cubic QTVR panorama at that location. Unlike the previous cylindrical panoramas, where you could turn around 360 degrees, Cubic panoramas allow you to look all the way up and down, in addition to all around you. In other words, you can see every direction from this location. When you're done viewing the picture, just close it and move on to the next panorama.

I'm a Geek. Give me the juicy technical details!

Let's start with the map. It was built using Quiver, a shareware map modeler similar to AutoCAD. Using both overhead shots and close-ups from teh ground, we were able to reconstruct the North Quad with an incredible amount of accuracy.

The cubic panoramas were one of the most complicated aspects of this project. Using a Nikon 880 Digital Camera and a spherical tripod donated to MacWarriors by Kaidan, took 4 rows of 14 pictures (56 total) for each panorama. We then used Photoshop and PanoTools to stitch the pictures into an equirectangular panoramas, then popped this picture into Apple's MakeCubic to create the final, Cubic QTVR movie.

To integrate QTVR into the Quake 1 engine, we basically re-wrote the teleporter function to halt the game portion of the code while a QTVR movie pops open. When the movie is closed, the game resumes from where it left off. We used the coordinates of the teleporter entities in the map to determine which movie to open and play.

Download here: (requires Quicktime 5, Mac OS 9 and a full version of Quake I): iCampus (10 mb)

Quick Start:

1. Download iCampus
2. Copy they pak1.pak file from your owned copy of Quake I into the ID1 folder of iCampus
3. Double Click on iCampus icon
4. If it looks like it is playing a demo of quake, hit '~' key and type in "map Beckman" hit return
5. Walk around and explore engineering campus, step on quicktime logo shaped teleporter pads
   to jump into a mouse-drag controled cubic QuickTime VR, and hit space bar to return to the 3d
   walkthrough

Developer links:

QTVR/Panotools:

http://www.fh-furtwangen.de/~dersch/

Quake:

http://www.planetquake.com/paroxysm/

http://www.indigita.com/david/quake/

http://www.planetquake.com/QuakeLab/problems.htm