VirtualBU

VirtualBU is a project being undertaken for the Binghamton University Admissions Office and the campus at large by a group of volunteer faculty and students that are interested in the technologies being used. Currently the project is under the guidance of Prof. Richard Steflik of the Watson School, Department of Computer Science with a volunteer workforce mainly from the Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science department's student bodies, although any student that is interested in being a part of the VirtualBU development team is welcome to participate (training will be provided). The project requirements come from the desire of the Admissions office to be able to offer prospective new students an online virtual reality style tour of the campus before the students actually go to the expense of physically visiting the campus. The campus is to be modeled with a high degree of reality using currently available solid modeling tools and presented to the viewer in a highly interactive, photo realistic 3D environment (similar to the SecondLife social networking web site)using the Project Wonderland Toolkit from the Open Source community and Sun Microsystems/Oracle. Currently there is a three year plan to be able to accomplish the virtualization of the campus and with the initial ability to provide limited virtual tours of the campus by the end of the spring 2010 semester. One of the long term goals of the project is to turn VirtualBU into a permanent student organization with faculty advisor(s) that will be responsible for updating and maintaining the virtual world and keeping it in step with changes to the campus caused by the campus construction schedule.

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