VŠB Vulkan Clock

A compact teaching demo: a real 3D analog clock rendered directly with Vulkan on Linux. The clock face, raised markings, hands and a stylized KI logo are procedural geometry; there are no texture/font assets to load.

Features

• Vulkan 1.x rendering through GLFW
• perspective camera + depth buffer
• real local system time, including smooth seconds
• physically inspired diffuse/specular lighting
• raised 3D dial, rim, hour/minute ticks and digits
• raised turquoise KI logo and bars inspired by the supplied reference
• interactive orbit camera and zoom
• gentle automatic camera motion suitable for a projector/demo
• swapchain recreation on resize
• deliberately small dependency set: Vulkan, GLFW, GLM

Ubuntu / Debian

sudo apt update
sudo apt install build-essential cmake libvulkan-dev vulkan-tools \
                 mesa-vulkan-drivers libglfw3-dev libglm-dev glslang-tools

For NVIDIA systems, use the normal proprietary NVIDIA driver instead of Mesa's Vulkan driver. You can quickly verify Vulkan with:

vulkaninfo --summary

Then just run:

./run.sh

Fedora

sudo dnf install gcc-c++ cmake vulkan-loader-devel vulkan-tools \
                 glfw-devel glm-devel glslang
./run.sh

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel cmake vulkan-headers vulkan-icd-loader \
             vulkan-tools glfw-x11 glm glslang
./run.sh

Controls

• Left mouse drag – rotate camera
• Mouse wheel – zoom
• Space – automatic subtle orbit on/off
• R – reset camera
• F – fullscreen on/off
• Esc – exit

Build manually

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build -j
./build/vsb-clock

Teaching notes

The source intentionally keeps the rendering architecture visible instead of hiding Vulkan behind an engine. Interesting places to discuss in src/main.cpp:

1. Vulkan instance/device/surface and queue-family selection
2. swapchain creation and resize handling
3. render pass + depth attachment
4. shader modules and graphics pipeline
5. vertex/index buffers and staging uploads
6. uniform buffer + descriptor set
7. push constants for per-object model matrices
8. procedural mesh generation
9. frame synchronization with semaphores and fences
10. conversion of real local time to 3D hand rotations

The KI mark here is a lightweight geometric classroom rendition rather than an official branding asset, so it stays dependency-free and remains clearly visible in 3D.