Steven Durant

I.  Title of the Project Create an interactive virtual environment.
    
II. Problem Statement
Learning to use OpenGL to create an interactive virtual environment.

III. Purpose      
The subject of the project is 3DGraphics, I will use OpenGL to create an interactive 
environment. The http://www.tjhsst.edu/~rlatimer/assignments2005/makingwebdocs.html
project is mostly for myself, I want to learn how to use OpenGL so that I can 
use it later in college and/or whatever job I get after college. It's worth 
doing mainly because it is an investment in the future, and it is a good topic 
because 3DGraphics are becoming more popular, it is actually one of the topics 
from UVA.

IV. Scope of Study      
I currently do not have much of an understanding of OpenGL, although I started 
to look into it during the Summer. First I will have to learn how to use OpenGL,
and then I can use it to create my project. The actual project of an interactive 
environment may take longer than I have to create, but because of my lack of knowledge 
I am not sure exactly how much I can accomplish. Looking at previous senior tech projects, 
I think I will be able to finish a large part of my project. 

V.Background and review of current literature/research in this area
3DGraphics are relatively new in Computer Science, mainly because computers 
couldn't display anything worth looking at until fairly recently. Everything I 
am doing has probably already been done, but I am not looking to do anything 
amazing, I just want to develop an understanding of OpenGL for myself. The final
project will look pretty, but probably will not be useful. There are not really
any websites to show where the "state of the art" is right now, but you could 
buy any new game at Best Buy and see it.

VI. Procedure and Methodology
The only task that has to be accomplished is for me to learn how to use VC++ and 
OpenGL. VC++ is actually mostly the same thing as C++ so that is not much of an obstacle, 
OpenGL is probably easy to learn through a good tutorial (which I have found).
After learning OpenGL, which should only take a month at most, I will have 
plenty of time to create a 3D environment and make it clickable and interactive.
This is actually already a shortened view of the project, I am hoping to have 
enough time to expand on this and load the environments into a different program 
where you could edit them and move around. 

VII.    Expected Results & Value to Others
     The results I expect to obtain are becoming fluent in OpenGL, and also 
having a cool program to show my friends. I am actually going to try to make 
the code readable to other programmers, so that if they want to see how it works, 
they can. I should be able to finish this before the end of the year, and will 
display it probably by various screenshots of my program.