Programming woes lead to creation of new software

Programming woes lead to creation of new software

BY
LIA UNRAU
Rice News Staff

Collaborative
virtual reality, in which two or more users in different
places can see and alter the same 3-D environment, as in
a medical procedure, scientific research or even games,
promises eye-popping experiences. But the task of programming
such environments has been enormous. Until now.

Two Rice undergraduates,
Jeff Hoye and Derek Ruths, have built a programming-development
environment where it’s possible to quickly develop
applications that provide interactive, multiperspective
and multisite visualization over the Internet or on any
networked system. What’s more, they’ve imposed
an enormous simplicity on the process.

As the Center
for Research on Parallel Computation (CRPC), a National
Science Foundation-funded science and technology center
headquartered at Rice, was winding down and evolving into
HiPerSoft, its director, Ken Kennedy, was looking for some
efforts to kick it into the next phase.

Both CRPC and
Rice had invested in an Immersadesk, a 3-D visualization
environment. To get non-CRPC people interested in using
the equipment, Kennedy, the Ann and John Doerr Professor
in Computational Engineering, offered an independent research
course and added a component to teach students how to make
technical presentations.

Ruths and Hoye
were freshmen and sophomores, respectively, in the course
and decided to create an astronomical visualization of a
planetary system, including the effects of gravity on the
planets. They painstakingly built an impressive demonstration
with complicated underlying mathematics. Furthermore, they
had to deal with highly complex programming interfaces and
an enormous amount of work. The question that plagued them
was: Why were there no programming interfaces available
that met their needs?

More long and
arduous hours in the lab on later, separate projects led
to comparisons of notes—it turned out that they both
had difficulty and complaints about the same aspects of
programming.

“Basically
we weren’t able to focus on the content,” Hoye
said. “We were spending all our time creating the framework.”

So over the
past year, Hoye, now a senior, and Ruths, a junior, created
their own new platform.

“This allows
you to go straight to the graphics and content,” Ruths
said.
The platform they built can be thought of as a kind of general
distributed operating system that provides fundamental services
for graphics and visualization.

With this platform
the Internet can be turned into a computing and visualization
engine for science or other purposes. For example, it makes
it possible to do remote medical visualizations, a form
of telemedicine, and certain kinds of multisite three-dimensional
games.

The software
offers transparent networking across different systems.
It would be useful for all types of programming—from
large computers to laptops to palm pilots. It has the potential
to be an extremely secure system, and it also allows the
users to cut the development time by orders of magnitude.

“In two
days, we made a powerful mock-up of a project that originally
took a year to develop using conventional toolkits,” Hoye said.

“What they’ve
done is a remarkable achievement and really is a first step
in the direction of major research strides toward making
the Internet a distributed computing platform and a distributed
information platform,” Kennedy said.

“Having
CRPC and Rice to support the building of research infrastructure
and students who have imagination and vision makes Rice
uniquely suited as a place where research projects generate
opportunities for students that they can carry out to the
extent that they wish,” Kennedy said. “To me it
embodies the notion of the fusion of research and undergraduate
education through advanced projects.”

At Kennedy’s
invitation, the two showed off their technical presentation
skills this fall at a meeting of the NSF in Washington,
D.C., where recent research results related to CRPC were
highlighted.

“We’re
going to change the way people write software,” they
said.

“I think
what is remarkable about Jeff and Derek is the level of
determination, maturity and independence that they exhibit,”
says Joe Warren, associate professor of computer science,
who has worked with Hoye since he was a freshman. “Lots
of folks at Rice have a good idea. The difference here is
that Jeff and Derek are acting to make their idea into reality.
Not many students have the qualities necessary to achieve
the goal.”

This fall, Hoye
and Ruths embarked on another project—they are pursuing
forming a company based on the software.