RAPT | Articulab Summer & Fall 2017 |
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The Rapport-Aware Peer Tutor (RAPT) project of the Articulab led by Professor Justine Cassell and PhD Student Michael Madaio, has developed a virtual partner that students can collaborate with, and which responds to, and can help foster, students’ socio-emotional awareness to help develop their ability to communicate and collaborate effectively.
My work for the RAPT project was primarily focused on improving the virtual agent's graphical fidelity by using the Unity Game Engine and applying a wide variety of modern computer graphics techniques. These included but were not limited to:
(In the image gallery above, the new and improved version of the RAPT environment is shown side-by-side with the original RAPT virtual environment, clearly highlighting the graphical improvements made.)
- Populating the scene with more books, computers, lamps, plants, globes and other miscellaneous classroom objects Adding
- more natural and uniform lighting
- Adding glass shaders to beakers
- Adding a skybox with clouds
- Adding bloom to the sky
- Adding motion blur
- Adding Soft Shadows
- Adding Anti-Aliasing
- Adding Ambient Occlusion
- Adding Slight Color Grading
- Adding textures to all objects in the scene
- Adding Screen Space Reflections on Cabinets
- Adding subsurface scattering to skin materials
(In the image gallery above, the new and improved version of the RAPT environment is shown side-by-side with the original RAPT virtual environment, clearly highlighting the graphical improvements made.)
