Liquid Galaxy Project

Web Page: http://code.google.com/p/liquid-galaxy/wiki/GSoC2011

Mailing List: mailto:lg-gsoc@endpoint.com

Liquid Galaxy (started as a Google 20% project) is a remarkable panoramic system that is tremendously compelling. As an immersive visualization tool it breaks new ground by using COTS (Commodity Off the Shelf) hardware, so it is relatively affordable--and orders of magnitude more cost-effective than CAVE (Computer-Aided Virtual Environment) technology. Applications that have been enabled to work on the Liquid Galaxy hardware infrastructure include Google Earth, the MPlayer video player and the video game Sauerbrauten. The goal of our group is to expand the capabilities of this great environment and to improve the ease with which the system can be set up, configured and administered using Open Source software and tools.

Projects

• Android Phone Accelerometer as Liquid Galaxy Input Device Currently, the most popular method of controlling Liquid Galaxy setups is through the use of a Space Navigator (produced by 3Dconnexion) and a touchscreen. My project aims to improve Liquid Galaxy’s accessibility by adding Android phones to the list of input devices. Since many people own Android phones already, this project would effectively eliminate the need to purchase additional peripherals in order to control a Liquid Galaxy setup.
• ClusterGL Development of the transparent OpenGL distributed rendering system for Liquid Galaxy hardware.
• Network Sync in Irrlicht Adding Network Sync support to the open source 3D graphics engine Irrlicht for use with the liquid-galaxy project. This involves synchronizing a game state across multiple computers in real time (at least 30 times a second) to produce a seamless gaming experience on a liquid galaxy computer. With the hundreds of applications currently developed with Irrlicht and its ease of use it is a perfect engine to support the liquid galaxy experience with potential for some really cool apps down the line