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Session 1332

CRCD: Low-Power Wireless Communications for Virtual Environments - Design Document

Kukjin Lee, Galen Faidley, Bernard Lwakabamba, Jayme Hero, Rob Walstrom, Diane T. Rover, Julie A. Dickerson, Robert J. Weber, Carolina Cruz-Neira, and Feng Chen

Iowa State University, Ames, IA, 50011

1. Introduction

An NSF Combined Research Curriculum Development (CRCD) project at Iowa State University integrates research from areas of wireless communications, low-power embedded systems, virtual environments, and human factors in an interdisciplinary program. The project involves both research and education activities.

The research goal is to design and implement low-power wireless communications systems for wearable sensor networks in virtual environments. The new communication systems expect to provide a unified and extensible communication mechanism between heterogeneous sensing devices (e.g., accelerometer, data glove, and wand) and virtual reality applications. The C6, which is a three-dimensional, full-immersion, synthetic environment at Iowa State University, serves as our testbed to demonstrate our systems.

The education goal is to develop an integrated educational program in which faculty members in different disciplines work closely together to mentor students to solve a complex interdisciplinary problem that combines real-time systems, wearable computers, human factors, Virtual Reality (VR), and wireless devices. For a better understanding of such an interdisciplinary problem, let us consider the development of a virtual kickboxing application. This application requires several different disciplines from its design to implementation stages. For example, students should know how hard a user punches his/her virtual opponent (human factor), how to measure the position, direction, and acceleration of arms (sensors), how to interface between sensors and the C6 (wireless communication), how to implement a virtual opponent in the C6 (VR application), and so on. Figure 1 shows communications and devices for a user in the C6 Cave.

One challenging issue in teaching is how to present such an interdisciplinary problem to students having different disciplinary training. To address this, we introduced a design document to define and present the problem in a way that supports students with different backgrounds so as to have the necessary discipline-specific information and understand the multidisciplinary aspects of the problem2. A central design document describes the larger system, and ancillary documents describe specific subsystems. Through a design document, a student should be able to Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2004, American Society for Engineering Education

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Weber, R., & Walstrom, R., & Lee, K., & Hero, J., & Faidley, G., & Lwakabamba, B., & Chen, F., & Dickerson, J., & Cruz-neira, C., & Rover, D. (2004, June), Crcd: Low Power Wireless Communications For Virtual Environments Design Document Paper presented at 2004 Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--13298