How can lessons learned at school be turned into applied expertise? And what do the two students who applied to us at VRVis for a summer internship specifically need for their further school and professional careers? These were the questions the researchers of our Geospatial Visualization, Semantic Modelling and Acquisition Group asked themselves and, of course, the interns Sebastian and Mateusz before they shaped an ambitious internship program for the two: the development of a first-person shooter game to teach essential visual computing know-how.
Linear algebra, including vectors, matrices, etc., is needed to calculate intersections, for example, without which you would have neither gravity nor the ability to hit a target in a first-person shooter. The basic knowledge from school in 3D modeling became without further ado the best starting point to design various models for a computer game. In addition to the ability to develop and refine game logic on their own, the two managed - almost playfully along the way - to greatly expand their basic knowledge of programming. By the time their month of internships came to an end, Mateusz and Sebastian were able to write code in F# on their own. A programming language they had never seen before!
The computer game "Aardwars", which was created collaboratively between Sebastian and Mateusz during the internship, and of course actively supported by the GeoSMAQ team, turned out to be quite impressive. If you want to convince yourself, you can test the game, which is based on Aardvark components, in the open source version released on Github - and of course develop it further.
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Vienna, August 12, 2022