Greet Our Students

Greeting Our Student : The Final Version

tb2010 — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 00:35:29 +0000

In a form of web service, we have finished the project S4 of “Greet Our Student” and made a presentation in the forum organized by Telecom Bretagne last week. We offered a web interface to the users to navigate and to find some interesting places around the school. A great many of visiters in the forum showed a interest in the application and asked us to present the main function in the main page. Many of them said that it’s useful to help the new student to get familiar with their new school.

Here’s the layout of the page:

In the left, there’s a main window shows the google earth base satelite map, with the basic google earth’s control, you can zoom, move or rotate the map from any angle. And what’s more important, is the information content around the campus, specifically the names of the places, and the image of 360 degree of each point. In the right lists some functions to help the students find the place, or to find a path between two points, by searching keywords in the database. Once given the path from one point to another, the users can navigate by following the path. And the system also gives a “walking” effect in the cruising mode.

The whole project is mainly realized basing on google earth api, and using some web script language like php,javascript and ajax. We store the photos, the kml files(contain the geolocation informations) in a svn space server(http://svn6.assembla.com/svn/GreetOurStudents/), and creat some point tables with their names, paths, and storing links in the school’s mysql server. Then it can provide these functions more concret and more user-friendly.

There still be some work to improve the performance, for exemple, we are completing a upload function to transfer a photo to the webspace and generate a corresponding kml file. And it will might be possible after some amendments, to move the web-project onto the school’s website, to make it a real easy-to-use and stable service to our students.

Summary: School Photos and 3d Building Models in Google Earth

tb2010 — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 12:52:31 +0000

In this stage we have accomplished part of the photo taking works around the school, and a primary building model in google earth. We use the tools referred in the previous post to proccessing the photos into panorama ones, in this way we can put the images into google earth and integrate with the 3d building models.

There are a lot of point in the school where we need to capture, such as roads, domitories, centre vie, and teaching buildings. For one point at the front of Residence – I8, we can illustrate the sewing course by the following two photos:

The two blue point of the left picture and the two red point of the right picture are respectively identically in reality.

Some algorithm can sew them aotomatically, you can also sew them by plotting the pair points manually(usually used on the pictures taken indoors).

At the same time we made a 3d model for the main building in the school by google sketchup. it’s easy to add them into google earth, so we can see the sea near the school! (we use a texture green and grey so as it will look like the real one)

And a experimental site was also build for displaying the google earth map and the school 2d map, the next step is to add the function into the system(tour around the school, searth the location , etc..).

Street Viewers, Panoramic Tools and VR Applications

tb2010 — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:52:16 +0000

So far we’ve decided to introduce the 360 degrees navigator into our project. And this will be the main part of the greeting system, which will show a detailed 3D map on the campus. The data will come from a quantity of photos taken on the campus, and then we need a panoramic tool to make all the photos up. By this way the system will show a moving view smoothly.

At the district level map, we have http://www.openstreetmap.org/ in which users can freely edit the map contents like wikis. we can also consider using bing map or other earth maps as long as you can access the data.

Due to providing a street viewer, for sure we’ll refer to the Google Street View, which shows maps at a street level. For the development, there’s an introductory article about Street View in the API at the official goole map api blog. You can also see the steet view’s api reference on “Using Street View Objects“. of course this is only one part from the full google map api documentation.

Here is an exmple of 3D navagation of National Taiwan University, when display, you need a google earth plug-in. And also some 3D campus of american universities are based on google maps in a building’s scale.

As for the choices of panoramic tools, there’s many. Some are commercial ones, such as the solutions from Easypano, and some are free ones. such as the editing tools like Hugin, or panorama viewers such as FreePV. The list of panorama tools can be found at http://www.softsea.com/software/Panorama.html.

Web applications can also add into the system, like http://www.sightwalk.de which shows a very clear image in major germany cities. It also provide an api http://www.sightwalk.de/content/api/. Bing map also provides a platform :http://www.microsoft.com/maps/default.aspx with a 3D option.

The work to be done is to combine the two levels of map(2D campus view and 3D road view) into one system, if possible , we’ll design it into a web application and add other useful features.

Features of Greeting System

tb2010 — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 14:25:29 +0000

Freshman always get confused when he arrives in a new circumstance, how to connect with other people for changing ideas before coming to school? how to know well around the campus? and how to get access to the facilities nearby? What the newcomers expect is exactly what our greeting system will do.

In view of helping the students to adapt with their new school’s life, we list four part of features of our greeting system.

make contact before arriving to the campus
pertinent information and geolocation on the campus
a “global village” to the virtual world
a community alive

In detail, regarding these use cases as follows:

New website which will organize all the information so that it will be visible and easy to access.
Link with existing website.
New student form.
Forum.
FAQs.
User friendly maps.
Things to do before coming.
Things to prepare before coming.
Search function.
360⁰ navigator.
Mobile devices.
Flash players.
Web game to introduce campus.
Videos to present our campus
Some attractive information.
Global village.

A Map of Residence at MAISEL

tb2010 — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 01:09:34 +0000

Want to find out who lives in your building or just look around the school? There’s an existing map on the website of maisel:

https://resel.fr/maiselPHP2/

TELECOM BRETAGNE MSC Project 2010

tb2010 — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:34:11 +0000

Greet our Students

The Computer Science Department is involved in social and pervasive learning research. We have developed relationships with the TEL scientific community, and university pedagogical networks at local, national and international level.

Telecom Bretagne also provides introductory classes in Intercultural Management and Communication for both students and staff, and organizes many activities to welcome our international students.

The aim of this project is to explore to what extent social tools and environments may improve student integration, foster social exchange and intercultural knowledge. The project will be based on use case definition and the exploration of social and collaborative tools. Integration of those tools through development of mashups or specific development will be the main deliverables of this project.