Compute shaders limit you to specific hardware/drivers/OS, I think you need OpenGL 4.3 which is very new and limits you to suitably recent nvidia hardware, or DirectCompute which limits you to Vista/7/8.
Working with just software may be fine? feel free to discuss with your teachers/professors at the end of a lesson to determine which platform would be suitable.
That poor guy attempted to write a raycaster, which should be simple enough but a complete lack of experience in writing and buiding software leads to such a situation, if you ask me to do a CS degree project I might end up this way.
Or maybe did he focus on advanced features (non orthogonal walls, textured ceilings, monsters/weapons, too much optimization I dunno)
People write raycasters all the time (even on 8bit computers), or raytracers, or maybe a voxel renderer (voxels stored in an octree are neat but dunno how easy or hard is that. also it's maybe a dead end that only allows to view static worlds). Sometime they do evil things, such as a raytracer in a postscript file.
They do it for fun and for their own learning, I don't think you can come up with something new nor should attempt to do so.
An ambitious enough project would be to write some multithreaded renderer but it could be hellish to debug, leave you with a broken and unrecoverable app that you have to start over from scratch again. So don't follow my advice. On the other hand learning that horrendous stuff while you still can seems useful. Some languages can have better concurrency support than others.
