a lot confused

[vineethraj]

hi friends,
i am doing my masters in computer science. happens to be that i have a lab project this semester on "virtual science museum" (no other options given). when i asked professor about the requirements, he told us to make our own requirements.
and he is expecting a graphical (obviously),animated and interactive project which should work on both PC's and Sun Solaris. i have no experience with solaris.
programming languages allowed: c,c++ and java

i felt java is better because its platform independent. can anyone suggest me what to do?
i have experience in java but not animation.
once again i am A LOT CONFUSED!!!???

[CaptainMorgan]

Having experience with Solaris personally, and knowing that Java is write-once, run-everywhere, you should have no problem deploying your app to Solaris. You'll probably have a better time programming the animation and interactivity in Java too. If you write in C/C++ you'll need to port the application for the intended OS, where Java there is no need. Lastly, there are plenty of online tutorials concerning animation - I expect a master's candidate to find them on their own.

[vineethraj]

i did find a lot of tutorials,but he damn wants us to simulate more than ten to fifteen of items in a museum (like experiments,dna verification, whatever...). i have got 2 other labs too. i am not whining about the project or anything. its just that its too vast to be completed in one semester. thats y i had to ask if any body could help me out with simple ideas so that i can start my programming. and i know once coded in java can be run on any system.
thanks for the reply capt'n...
i know m askin too much, but can u just give me some suggestions(simple ones) which could be finished easily, ofcourse with moderate amount of coding in it.
thank you once again.

[Dr Scientific]

Some straightforward virtual labs might be --

Brownian motion (changing temperature, particle size/mass, fluid viscosity)
Natural selection (changing predator characteristics or environment or species characteristics)
Projectile motion -- always a favorite (changing launch energy, projectile mass, launch height, projectile diameter (affects air resistance), launch angle)
Photoelectric effect (changing light wavelength, metal, voltage on electrode)

Literally, there are thousands of options here. You should have no problem except deciding which ones to pick. Finding some is so easy. Many, many java applets already exist on the web. You can just search some out and see if you can do better.

I've used Java to build a system for using real experiments online instead of doing simulations.

[vineethraj]

thank you scientific, i'll look into it.