During my M.Sc. studies in Lappeenranta University of Technology, I wanted to take most of my time there, and enrolled courses that were most interesting for me. Some of those had rather interesting opportunities for course projects. As doing something that barely fulfills the criteria has never been exactly my thing, those project works ended up quite interesting too. Some of those are introduced here.
Beam Processing course or: Nokia meets an industrial laser
Pew pew. Beam Processing course was one of the most interesting things the university had to offer for us. Before 2010’s, the university had a lab, a dedicated building, full of laser and electron beam welding and processing equipment, and we were given a chance to get familiar with those. Could you have resisted not to put your Communicator into the beam and hitting the red button? I could not.
The photo is of me flying my powered hang glider. 😉
User Interface Design course: A Slot Machine game
Bored? How about a nice game of Jackpot? This was an exercise project for the User Interfaces -course at Lappeenranta University of Technology in 2005. If I remember our assignment correct, we were asked to create an example application with a simple and self-explanatory user interface, like a simple game or so.
Programmed using Visual Basic. Runs on Windows. Download the zip file and unzip it. Run jackpot.exe.
Download
Computer graphics course: OpenGL Pacman and PovRay
As a course assignment for Computer Graphics programming course, we had to create an OpenGL application using some of the API’s basic features. a course that taught us computer graphics. In the academic world, OpenGL and raytracing were seemingly a thing back then. My two project works from that course, are included here. The more features chosen from a list, the better grade. And if the application was in form of a playable game, the overall grade got even better. This was my assignment, written in C.
As the trademark-infringing video game was not enough, we also had to learn PovRay and render a picture and a video using it. The more features implemented from a list of “suggestions”, and the more entertaining rendering, the better the grade. And this cosmic thing is what I came up with. It was created only with a text editor. No 3D modeling software was used as that would have brought the grade lower or something. The POV file and textures which were used to render it, can be found inside the zip archive.
