As a project, I suggest the development of shader programs using Rendermonkey or the Cg Toolkit, or a simple game in DirectX.

You may further explore the possibilities of platform independent integration of 3D and media, by studying for example OpenML. For further reading, among the many books about DirectX, I advice  [Luna (2003)],  [Adams (2003)] and  [Fay et al. (2004)].