the summer after my freshman year at yale i participated in robocup 2000 in melbourne, australia. if you like robotics, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and/or soccer, this is something you should definitely look into, although it requires the collaboration of many people from different fields.
this past summer i worked for sandia national labs in livermore, ca, programming a distributed sensor system with an embedded expert system shell. the project was really fun, and if it ever gets a web site i'll link to it from here.
here's a project i did for my intelligent robotics class at yale: it's a boids simulator. this particular simulator has a primitive way of visualizing a three-dimensional space, but it allows you to modify the sensor error, and see how sensor error affects boid behavior. (a boid is a bird object.)
meanwhile, check out the following computer science paper by prof. forsyth of cal berkeley: finding naked people. it's the funniest serious science paper i've encountered. (note, this paper has diagrams as many others do, so beware.)
other links:
copyright (c) 2000
stephen elliott