Marc O’Morain

Andy from my house promised to take the book on Finite Element Analysis (FEA) out on loan from his university (Imperial) library for me today. That saves me a lot of money, which is always a good thing. Amazon says that the book has fortran code examples. I need to now learn fortran. It can’t be too difficult however; my mother had to program it with punch cards at university.

Wikipedia has some information on FEA that I have been reading recently.

My supervisor is Carol O’Sullivan. My project is:

Physically-based sounds for collision handling:

In (Van den Doel et al. 2001) and O’ Brien et al. #1, #2, physically-based sound is described. This project would involve the integration of sound into our collision handling framework. Depending on interest, this could involve an investigation of haptic (or touch) feed-back, using our Phantom force-feedback device. In addition, issues relating to the perception of collision sounds and touch could be incorporated.

Things that I need to do:

• Get in contact with Carol, and get her to give me a copy of her physics engine.
• Get my hands on a copy of this book on finite element analysis.
• Learn finite element analysis inside out.
• Learn about sound:
  • How is it stored on computer?
  • What library will I use to interface with the computer’s sound hardware?
• Decide on what sort of project I will aim for:
  • Perhaps develop an application that lets uses play with sound and physics in real time
  • Perhaps do some tests on peoples perceptions with varying levels of accuracy.
• Decide on a widget set (MFC/FLTK?).