Big screen games refers to a concept where a game is played by a group of people using a large shared screen, say a cinema size screen. Perhaps conceptualise it as extending the multiplayer game style popularised by the Wii but instead of 4 or 8-way maximum players, scale up from there to say a 100 players. The project is to investigate and develop a prototype game suitable for this paradigm. Sports games such as volleyball might be natural fit, but more novel approaches are encouraged. Initially the projection wall in the Sutherland Laboratory would be used.
Beryl and Compiz are 3D Window/Desktop managers being developed for Linux. See (http://www.beryl-project.org/ and also try running Compiz on the Sutherland machines). The project is to develop a theme based on zoom and pan.
A lot of high-screen hour programmers use inverse video/white on black - seemingly less tiring on the eyes. The project is to develop a greyscale theme, similar perhaps to what was available on the Next, but with just a dash of colour.
Alien Swarm is a UT2004 mod. Gameplay is cooperative with a top-down view. The project is to develop a new campaign.
OpenGL 2.1 has geometry shaders, which allow vertex computations to be performed on the GPU. The project is to investigate and compare the performance of an algorithm which computes vertices on a CPU and on GPU.
In Mathematics some glyphs (symbols) need to be stretch. For example the integral sign needs to stretch vetically to match the integrand. Likewise a bracket needs to stretch to a vertical size to match the expression inside the bracket. Even more subtly, the shape of a stretch symbol can adjust to give better visual appearance depending on the amount of stretch: for a curved bracket the curvature becomes less with increasing height.
The implementation of MathML in Firefox renders stretchy symbols in a piecewise manner by assembling them from other glyphs. The project is to investigate implementing stretch symbols using font technolgy in OpenFont, with the aim of avoiding symbol assembly, instead programatically adjusting glyph size and shape in the the font rendering itself.