Virtual ITU

Introduction

VirtualITU is a project that aims to create a virtual world for Istanbul Technical University in Istanbul. The idea comes from the virtual Binghamton University which has been fully completed and can be visited by everyone. The ITU part of the project also offers students an online virtual realty tour of ITU Maslak campus. Currently the project is under the guidance of Prof. Richard Steflik of the Watson School, Department of Computer Science. Any future student who is interested in being a part of the VirtualITU development is welcome to participate to VirtualITU project.

Project Definition

Virtual ITU is 3D-modeled version of the real ITU-MASLAK campus by using sketchUp modeling tool and Open Wonderland virtual world servers. Virtual ITU includes some of the interesting and well-looking buildings of ITU-MASLAK (AYAZAGA) campus that are ITU Mustafa Inan Library, Faculty of Electrical and Electronics Engineering building and Faculty of Civil Engineering building. The models of the trees, roads, students and some other objects in SketchUp Warehouse were added to make the Virtual ITU more realistic.

Purpose of the project

The purpose of the project is to offer students a virtual tour of ITU campus before the students actually visit the campus physically. Also, We aim to turn the project to an open project for any future students who will be responsible for updating and building in other ITU buildings to the project.

Background Information of Buildings

Virtual ITU includes 3 buildings in the Maslak campus: ITU Mustafa Inan Library, Faculty of Electrical and Electronics Engineering building and Faculty of Civil Engineering building

ITU Mustafa Inan Library

Mustafa Inan Library was established in 2007 and located in Maslak campus of ITU. The library includes 5 floors. The books published here constituted the core of the ITU Library. ITU libraries have approximately 500,000 volumes of books periodicals, and 6000 rare Ottoman/Latin books. The number of subscription periodicals is 1,300. ITU Library has access to international libraries and online databases. It has the largest collection on technical materials (science and engineering) in Turkey. It is Turkey’s contemporary and technically richest library. ITU Mustafa Inan Library is the central library of the six libraries and coordination center of the library services of the Technical University. ITU Library Services' history goes back to 1795, the printing house of the Mühendishane-i Berri-i Hümayun of Ottoman Empire.

ITU Electrical and Electronics Engineering building

In 1926, the “Institute of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering” was founded as part of the Science Faculty of Istanbul University (Istanbul Dar-ül Fünun). In 1934, the institute was bounded to “Yüksek Mühendis Mektebi” (Advanced Vocational School for Engineering), today’s Istanbul Technical University, as the Electro-Mechanic Division, which was the start of Department of Electrical Engineering. The first students of this division graduated in 1936.[1] The faculty has five departments today: Computer engineering, Control engineering, Electrical engineering, Electronics engineering, and Telecommunications engineering.

ITU Faculty of Civil Engineering building

ITU School of Civil Engineering is the first faculty of Istanbul Technical University. Its foundation date is considered as the starting of the engineering education in Ottoman Empire. Faculty has three divisions: Civil engineering, Geomatic engineering, and Environmental Engineering.

Technical Details

• Google Sketch-up: a 3D modelling program for a broad range of applications such as architectural, civil, mechanical, film as well as video game design — and available in free as well as 'professional' versions.
• Open Wonderland: a 100% Java open source toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds. Within those worlds, users can communicate with high-fidelity, immersive audio, share live desktop applications and documents and conduct real business. Open Wonderland is completely extensible; developers and graphic artists can extend its functionality to create entirely new worlds and add new features to existing worlds.

Development Process

• To start with, photos of the ITU library and the other buildings were taken to generate a realistic 3D Models of the buildings.
• In the learning process of Sketch Up, We have started to use video tutorials of Google Sketch Up and we had enough knowledge about SketchUp tools, LayOuts, Style Builder and using SketchUp with Google Earth before started to model the buildings.
• In the modeling of the ITU Library, Faculty of Electrical and Electronics Engineering building and Faculty of Civil Engineering building, Google SketchUp was an free software that enables to model the buildings with actual measurements and appearance fairly easily.
• In implementation on Open Wonderland server, 3D models of the buildings designed using with SketchUp is exported to Open Wonderland environment. The 3D models are implemented and tested in the Binghamton University’s Open Wonderland server at the http://vbu.cs.binghamton.edu:8080/ so that anyone would be able to have a walk in the ITU virtual world and view the ITU

Problems Encountered

• The most important problem that we encountered was to achieve the real pictures of the buildings. It took a long time to get the pictures from a long distance and it wasted our time at the beginning of the project.

• Another problem that we encountered was to achieve the original measurements of the buildings. Because the department who is responsible for the building plans of ITU did not allow us to get the plots and the plan of the building. The communication process with ITU caused a delay to begin Virtual ITU project. Therefore, we used a tool named “Import” that we can use images to get real measurements with the “Matching Photo” feature of this tool. We would be able to approach the real dimensions as close as possible. Additionally, we have used Google Earth Plug-in to find the building’s real location on the earth. Now, we can see ITU library with its real-world content.

• The final problem that we encountered was a performance issue. We have realized that 3D models run slower when we implement it to Open Wonderland environment and after adding additional buildings and SkethUp Warehouse components, it was nearly impossible to run the project in Open Wonderland so that we searched out a solution to lower the size of the 3D models. Eventually, we decided to import Jpeg images into our models rather than drawing every windows, doors and any other repetitive components.

Final 3D Models

ITU Library

File:FrontView.jpg File:RightSideView.jpg

Contact Information

Project Designers:

Fatma Dagdevir, fdagdev1[at]binghamton[dot]edu

Berkay Pehlivan, bpehliv1[at]binghamton[dot]edu

Project Manager:

Prof. Richard Steflik, steflik[at]binghamton[dot]edu