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From: johng@oce.orst.edu (John A. Gregor)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: Re: Request for Information
Message-ID: <1991Apr23.025611.11206@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 22 Apr 91 23:58:58 GMT
References: <1991Apr22.164357.10184@milton.u.washington.edu>
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In article <1991Apr22.164357.10184@milton.u.washington.edu> cmcintos@oucsace.cs.
ohiou.edu (Chip Mcintosh) writes:

> I am not in computer science because I want to be a programmer for the
> rest of my life, I'm in it because I want to make some of my dreams
> come to fruition, and computer science provides the best means to this
> end.

> Over the past few years I have been doing a lot of thinking about
> virtual worlds, but I have no idea which path to take so that I might
> work on it.  

> So what I need to know is this:  What direction do I need to point
> myself in?  

As with any emerging technology, the more diverse your background, the
better.  For VR to take off, it has to be used for _something_.  Having
experience in that _something_ will be as useful to you as your CS
experience.

> What types of CS classes do you think I should take(AI, databases,
> etc.) in order to get going with what I want to do.  

I think that you should expand your focus beyond CS classes.  If you
haven't experienced real-world (tm) problems that could benefit from VR
ideas, you won't be able to judge as effectively what features/paradigms
are the most valuable.

Some areas you might want to look at:

    -Technical Theater, Lighting

    Get a feel for how the theater folks model the real world with as few
    props as possible.

    -Broadcast Media, TV Direction

    To learn how the TV folks present a model of the real world on a 2D
    TV screen.

    -Engineering

    Lot's of visualization of complex data, highly interactive CAD tools,
    etc.  They are pushing the limits on many of the areas relevent to
    VR.

    -Architecture

    They are heavily into CAD.  Also they often produce animated
    (sometimes even interactive) walkthroughs of proposed buildings to
    show to customers.

    -Computational Chemistry

    They are trying to get a feel for the properties of large molecules,
    so they are doing lots of 3D viewing.  Also some experiments with
    force feedback devices to probe for binding sites, etc.

    -Molecular Biology

    Same as above mostly.

    -Cognitive Science

    Learn about how we perceive and remember the world around us.

In the CS domain:

    -Graphics, graphics, graphics

    Pretty obvious.

    -Math, math, math

    To be able to do all the graphics, graphics, graphics.  Linear Alg,
    and computational geometry are the biggies.  A good grounding in set
    theory and topology won't hurt.

    -Networking, Distributed computing, Distributed databases, 

    A lot of the VR stuff wants to share a reality among lots of people.
    So almost any parallel distributed computing work will be useful.
    The database is as much of a bottleneck as the graphics (especially
    if the world is writeable or if you want to model object-object
    interactions (like collisions)).

    -Other programming paradigms

    Functional prgramming (lisp, ml, fp), logical programming (prolog),
    object-oriented programming (smalltalk), etc. each add new
    programming paradigms that are extremely effective at solving some
    problems.  Being fluent in more than one is a plus.


> Any help any of you can give will be very much appreciated.  Thanks a
> lot.

Have fun!

JohnG
-- 
John A. Gregor
College of Oceanography                  E-mail: johng@oce.orst.edu
Oregon State University                 Voice #: +1 503 737-3022
Oceanography Admin Bldg. #104             Fax #: +1 503 737-2064
Corvallis, OR  97331-5503