ellipsoid

Hi there. I am about to enter my final year of a computer science bachelor degree and must do a final year project that spans most of the academic year. I have some experience on the artistic side of computer graphics but none in the computer science side. I would be interested in developing some kind of ray tracer as a final year project but have been told that my project should be technically challenging, have a reason for someone to use my version over any existing version and solve some kind of particular problem. Perhaps I am out of my depth trying to develop a ray tracer that can satisfy the above criteria when I have no prior experience? Some have talked about making one that runs better than existing solutions or being optimised for something in particular. I am not quite sure how I could do this and would greatly appreciate and thoughts, ideas or suggestions on this or any unique relatively unexplored areas of raytracing I could base a project around? Many thanks

Hi there. I start my final year of my computer science degree this September and, alongside other modules, will do an independent final year project. I have not had very much CS experience outside my degree so I am a bit unsure what would be feasible for me while not being too trivial such that I receive a poor grade. I was looking to do something related to my interests and one of my initial ideas that my tutor seemed to like was generating an image from a given piece of music. I am not yet fully sure about what metrics I would use to do this, but I was thinking a combination of rhythm, lyrics, velocity and harmonics. For a general example, an aggressive sounding piece of music would result in an aggressive feeling image, a calming song, a calm feeling image and so on. The project must have some success criteria that can be evaluated and I was thinking I could survey participants and ask whether the generated image fits with the song. In the past two years in my degree, I have programmed a fair bit in Java, Haskell and a tiny bit in C. Would you say that this idea for a project would be two difficult to do in the roughly 6 months of time given considering my perhaps more limited experience? Also could you tell what language(s) you would recommend something like this be done in as well as existing packages and/or software that could be useful for this? I was thinking that with a given audio file, I could do some web retrieval of existing images and combine it with some abstract procedurally generated images however if you think doing both would be too much or if one of these would be too difficult then I can simplify? Also, my initial plan was for this to be done in real time with visual elements coming in as a piece is playing but once again, if this would be too difficult to achieve good results with, I can rethink that? I guess I have a few questions here but I would appreciate any thoughts on any of this and am happy to provide more info where I can. Thank you very much.