Final Project

Here's your opportunity to explore an additional topic not covered in the previous assignments. It can be an extension of one of the homework assignments, a portion of your graduate research, a significant module of a final project for another course, or a brand-new project. Hopefully you can connect what you've learned in this course to your research area or other interests. The scope of your assignment should be carefully defined so that it can be successfully completed in about a month.

Teams of two are strongly encouraged, but you may do an individual project with permission from the instructor. You will share your results through an in-class presentation to your peers and a publication-quality writeup.

The project must include a significant programming component related to computer graphics. You may use existing libraries or other open source code to build your project, just make sure you document and give credit to the original source. You are not required to use C++ and OpenGL for your project.

Proposal

As you choose your topic and begin to flesh out the details, keep in mind that implementing new data structures or algorithms can take much longer than anticipated. Also be warned that designing and implementing even relatively simple user interfaces require alot of effort (and is not particularly relevant to this course).

Your proposal should be formatted using html or pdf. The document should be a minimum of 500 words (equivalent of 2 pages double spaced text) and include:

A brief summary of the technical problem you are going to investigate.
A list of the specific research papers and other sources you've collected for background reading. Talk with the instructor if you are unable to find at least 3 relevant research papers. Read and summarize the contributions of each paper and describe how your project relates to this work.
As appropriate for your project, describe a sequence of examples (from the most trivial to moderately complex) that you plan to test to demonstrate the features of your project.
A timeline for your assignment with a list of the tasks you will execute and who will do what. It's ok to list optional tasks that you will work on once the core features are functional. You will be graded relative to the completion of the core tasks, so make sure your plan is feasible.

Final Report

Your final report should be formatted using html or pdf and follow a standard technical writing format (e.g., motivation, related work, algorithm/technique, results, conclusions, and bibliography). All students are encouraged to format their final report for submission to a relevant academic graphics or graphics-related conference (SIGGRAPH, Eurographics, etc.). The report must be a minimum of 2000 words (equivalent of 8 pages double spaced text, excluding figures & references). Your report should describe the technical details of your project; in particular, we want to know about:

Any algorithms or data structures you implemented.
The core features of your assignment and how you tested them.
The challenges that you overcame (or failed to overcome). Note: As you're working on your project, save "blooper" images or video that show your intermediate results and how you debugged your project, and include them in your report & presentation.
Images/screenshots/visualizations/video showing the results of your project. Include simple and moderately complex examples.
Any known bugs or limitations in your implementation, and potential avenues for future work.
How long it took you to complete the assignment, and who did what.

Make sure to acknowledge (in proper bibliographic format) all references you consulted to complete the assignment and the extent of any collaboration with other students or outside sources. As with the other assignments, submit your source code, any necessary data files, and sample images or video showing the results.

The final project reports are due on the date specified on the calendar. You may not use any late days for the report. We will not accept any late material unless accompanied by a note from the Dean of Students office.

Please include a representative 200x200 image with your submission for the project index page (see last year's projects). All projects reports will be posted online by default. If you do not want your project report posted online please send the instructor an email.

Final Project Presentation

During the last few class periods of the term, each individual/team will present their final project to the class (individuals will have 10-15 minutes, teams of 2 will have 20-25 minutes). Attendance and participation (asking good questions) at your classmate's presentations is mandatory.

Summarize prior work as necessary. You don't need to discuss papers we covered in class.
Be technical: What were the challenges? How did you solve them?
Please give a live demo of your project if possible (depends on the project of course).
Teams of 2: Both students should present, and make it clear who did what.
Practice and time yourself.