None of us can guess what excites you. That's really for you to decide. You've mentioned a variety of things, some of which are eye candy, others of which are anything but eye candy.

All of the things I mentioned, eye candy or not, were in fact examples(a small subset) of things that excite me. What I need is a formal frame, a project title under which I can do things that excite me. I did search the web and the usual suspects but didn't find the spark I was looking for yet. Since this BBS has proven countless times that it is a pool of clever heads, of which many have hands-on experience with projects/theses, I figured I'd ask what you guys have come across. It seems like you have a pretty decent idea about all the perennial favourites like the genetic algorithms used to breed pretty pictures. Definitely a cooler programming project than anything we did up to now. What else do your students like?