Virtual Reality experiences often showcase highly realistic 3D environments, intuitive interactions and unique avatar embodiment scenarios. Maintaining immersion in such environments for a quality experience requires perceiving properties of the immersive virtual environment (IVE) veridically. This is necessary as users interpret spatial information like size, depth and distance from the optic flow provided by the […]

It is often questioned whether task performance attained in a virtual environment can be transferred appropriately and accurately to the same task in the real world. With advancements in virtual reality (VR) technology, recent research has focused on individuals’ abilities to transfer calibration achieved in a virtual environment to a real-world environment. Little research, however, […]

Rapid technological advancements and lowering prices of commercial Head-Mounted Displays (HMD) have led to an increased demand for modern VR applications, many of which, involve the travel and exploration of large virtual environments. Of multiple VR travel metaphors studied in the past, steering is one that is relatively intuitive and straightforward, giving users continuous control […]

This simulation was developed to supplement the aviation curriculum at technical colleges. It offers students a chance to practice starting up and shutting down an aircraft without requiring an actual plane. The simulation has a training phase which take users through the startup process step by step as many times as necessary. Once the user […]

This simulation was developed to demonstrate integration of custom 3D printed tangible objects with off-the-shelf VR devices and general use devices like the Microsoft Surface dial. It was demoed during the Tangibles within VR tutorial at the 25th IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces in Germany on 18th March, 2018. The simulation […]

Users are able to calibrate to various changes to both their own abilities and their surrounding environments. Most calibration studies have examined recalibration to stable perturbations (i.e., a single, constant change). However, numerous real-world experiences involve perturbations that do not remain constant. To understand how unstable perturbations affect calibration in terms of postural sway and […]

This simulation was developed to supplement the aviation curriculum at technical colleges. It provides an interactive environment to teach students how to tow aircrafts in VR. The simulation models real world physics of towing a plane with a dual-pivot tow bar setup implemented using configurable joints and springs. It offers scaffolded learning which helps aviation […]

The website presented in this post was designed and implemented for the Clemson University Graduate Student Government. The development process involved migrating content from an external server to internal Clemson servers, development using HTML\CSS, PHP, JavaScript, JQuery, AJAX and MySQL and making the design mobile friendly. The website incorporates automatic Google calendar events, senate updates […]

This tool was developed to aid an Alzheimers content analysis study. Building the tool involved scrapping over 400,000 posts and related user data from the ALZConnected.org website using scrappy. A subset of 3,000 posts and replies were then extracted randomly from the scrapped data using custom scripts for categorization by the investigators and stored in […]

This simulation was developed as part of the final class project for the course Technical Character Animation. The simulation showcases a small desktop VR game featuring a cartoon forest with giant marshmallows. The player is tasked with roasting and consuming as many giant marshmallows as possible in a duration of 5 minutes. The player is […]

The Augmented Reality application resented in this post was created to address the IEEE 3DUI 2017 contest challenge and was selected for presentation at the conference in Los Angeles, USA in 2017. The task was to build an AR application using mobile devices which allows manipulation of object states and parameters present in the scene […]

This research investigate multiple levels of bimanual interaction metaphors in immersive and non-immersive virtual environments using metrology as a test bed. The simulation features a classroom environment where users can learn to use and interact with measuring instruments like Vernier Calipers, Micrometers, etc. They are taught how to operate them to measure objects and take […]

This simulation was developed to supplement the aviation curriculum at technical colleges. It teaches students about safety hazards and how to inspect a cargo bay using a virtual environment. This simulation offers a unique networked virtual environment where multiple users can simultaneously inspect an aircraft’s cargo bay while being supervised by an instructor. The users […]

During the second year of grad school I worked as a graduate assistant at the Clemson University graduate school office. My duties involved assisting with the development of a new graduate school website, maintaining internal ISS servers and attending to any web related issues. Building the website involved working with the responsive framework, Foundation, to […]

This simulation was developed as the final project for the Virtual Reality Systems course at Clemson University and won the best project demo award. The simulation features a collaborative desktop VR puzzle solving game. Two players are put in a construction site environment where they collaboratively scale, rotate and translate objects to solve puzzles to […]

The purpose of this project was to get familiar with the RenderMan Shading Language. For this, I shaded and rendered a Carousel Horse using mental ray and maya shaders. Then I tried to replicate the horse using custom renderman shaders. I used the sources listed below to understand and get started with RSL.

For this project I focused a lot on interior lighting and using image textures for different surfaces. Strangely, the scene did not have any groups or hierarchies instead similar objects were part of a single mesh. For example, all the cabinets were a single mesh. This made things a lot more difficult to shade. I […]

This project involved dealing with caustics and using refractive materials to make jewels. To shade this scene, most of the materials used were mental ray materials. The gold shader was the first thing I worked on. I tried using a blinn material with ramps and noise because it was going to be used for a […]

The goal of this project was to explore procedural texturing and UV mapping in Maya using a fruit bowl model. The fruit bowl model was taken from challenge number 1 on 3drender.com. I used more of procedural texturing than UV mapping due to the number of NURBS objects in the scene. I started by exploring […]

The purpose of this project was to explore lighting and surfacing in Maya. The model of a Wacom stylus on a table top was provided for the same. I started off by creating separate materials for different parts of the stylus. The button, tip and the eraser use the same glossy type of a material. […]

This project involved implementing a ray tracer with reflection, anti-aliasing using super-sampling and spherical inverse mapping. Results obtained for each feature are displayed separately along with the final result.

Problem: Make an awesome animation lasting 10-30 seconds. Solution: For my final project, I decided to play around with dynamics and use all other techniques learnt throughout the semester. The video mainly showcases dynamics, key-frame animation and 2D texturing.

Problem: Explore a new rigging technique in Maya Solution: Since, I am thinking about building a rig for the body for my 4th Project it would be good to explore the HumanIK tool. This gave me a fairly good idea of how the controls are set and how each joint behaves.

Problem: Rig your own hand model and skin it Solution: I tried rigging my own model but unfortunately the paints just won’t work right and I was getting some points that would move with another joint but were not paint at all.

Problem: Rig the character mesh provided and animate it using controllers. Solution: For this project, I crated a custom skeleton for the character mesh provided and then built a custom control rig to go with it. I followed the tutorial “Introduction to Character Rigging in Maya” on Digital Tutors to build the control rig.

Problem: Build a skeleton and animate a walk cycle for the provided block man model. Solution: I started off by building the skeleton for the model by using the joint tool. This was pretty simple as the block man’s body parts were separately created. The only tricky part was parenting the right part to the […]

Problem: Create an alternate walk cycle for the Block Man Solution: I used sneaky walk cycle frames provided here to build an alternate walk cycle for the block man model. Simply following the frames provided gave me the desired result and then I just copied them for another loop on the time line.

Problem: Using Lighting, Rendering, Texturing and Shading create a 10-20 second animation for the Unicycle provided. Solution: For this project, I decided to have unicycle warm up in the beginning, do a stunt and then celebrate at the end of the movie.

Problem: Watch the animated movie selected by you and identify 3 animation principles from it. Solution: The 3 animation principles identified are as follows: 1. Appeal: Mogli’s head and eyes are much bigger in comparison to his body to make him likable.

Problem: Create shaders for the still life model using three-point lighting and use a moving camera to render the scene. Solution: I used separate materials to color the objects in the scene and then used 3 spot lights to create the three-point lighting. Then I used an EP curve to create a spiral around and […]

Problem: Using all the techniques learned so far, model a Pixar character. Solution: I decided to model the Little Green Men from Toy Story, originally taken from the Buzz Lightyear cartoon series. These seemed really simple because of the shape of their body but they had a lot of really small detailed and it was […]

Problem: Model an Egghead using the Sculpt Geometry tool Solution: As demonstrated in class, I started off with a NURBS sphere and modified the scale to get the basic shape of an egg. Next, The Sculpt Geometry tool was used to pull and push on the surface of the egg to make it look like […]

Problem: Model a Utah Teapot using NURBS and other modeling tools learnt so far. Solution: I started off with a single NURBS cylinder and then used soft select and resizing to get the basic shpae of the teapot. Then used curves, NURBS circles and the surface extrude command to make the handle and spout.

Problem: Analyze youe hand as a modelling object, take pictures of it. model your hand using polygon modelling. Solution: I started off by building the palm using 4 curves and lofting around them. Each curve was setup to have 12 points and there were 6 spans between 2 curves. Then I used cylinders and curves […]

Problem: Model a chair using the reference image provided. Solution: To model the chair as close to the reference image provided I started off with a cube and used the bevel tool to round the edges. Next, I extensively used the interactive split tool and others like insert loop to get extra geometry wherever necessary […]

Problem: Model a computer monitor using the polygon modeling tools. Solution: To model a computer monitor I used an iMac as reference and started off with a polygon cube. The extrude tool was used to make the stand on the back of the monitor and also to extend all the faces on the edge of […]

Problem: Model the solar system and animate the planets and moons to revolve and rotate. Solution: To complete the above mentioned exercise I used different primitives (not just spheres) as planets so their rotation about the axis is easy to make out. Each planet has at most 2 moon revolving around them. The animation is […]

Problem: Build a table and a lamp, only based on primitives (by scaling,translating, rotating). Solution: The primitives used for this model include Cube, Cylinder, Pipe, Cone ad Sphere. The model showcases a simple table built using only cubes. The lamp is more complex in comparision to the table.

This work investigates the use of Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) protocols and its effectiveness in streaming high quality media. This approach to video streaming adjusts the video quality delivery to the client player based on changing network conditions. We test 2 DASH based algorithms in this study under varying levels of network impairment […]