Jeffrey C
- Research Program Mentor
PhD Doctor of Philosophy candidate
Expertise
applied mathematics, physical simulation, machine learning, computational geometry, numerical methods for science and engineering
Project ideas
Project ideas are meant to help inspire student thinking about their own project. Students are in the driver seat of their research and are free to use any or none of the ideas shared by their mentors.
Collision Detection and Physical Simulation in Video Games
You're playing a dodgeball video game. You throw a ball at another player. How do you know if the ball hits the other player? The answer is obvious to us, but it's not obvious to the computer that's simulating the dodgeball game. In fact, collision detection is one of the most time-consuming operations that a computer must perform when simulating a virtual environment. So how do computers detect collisions, and how do they do it fast? It's your job to research the algorithms that make real-time collision detection possible and implement them in your own simple game.