Homework 2, due Wed Sept 11, 2013

Hand in your solution on RPILMS. Each team should submit their solution under only 1 student's name. The other student's submission should just name the lead student. (This makes it easier for us to avoid grading it twice.) For programming exercises, hand in code and screen dumps. We won't run your code, but will use the screendumps to judge how it worked.

1. (4 pts) Which RPI grad was the technical person in the founding group of NVidia?
2. (4 pts) What hardware component had to get much cheaper in order to make frame buffers possible?
3. (4 pts) What is the main physical principal that makes the Kinect function? Write not more than 100 words. This requires research. There may be several valid answers.
4. (20) Modify the simpleViewer demo program from last week to display the spaceship NCC1701 as follows.
   1. Strip out the code to draw the spiral.
   2. In the initialization routine, read a list of triangles from the file ncc1701b.data. Each line gives the vertices of one triangle as follows:
      x1 y1 z1 x2 y2 z2 x3 y3 z3
   3. (Alternatively, if you have too much time and want to test the limits of your compiler, use your favorite powerful editor to turn that file into a several thousand line C++ initialization statement, embed it into your program, and then see if it will compile.)
   4. Draw each triangle with a color whose brightness depends on the angle between the triangle and the plane z=0. (This will approximate a light shining from up high.)
   5. Put all the vertices into one array and the colors into another and then draw everything with one call.

(Total: 32 points.)