News

On Tuesday, November 29th, 2016, three of the international brain initiatives presented their status and achievements at an international workshop named "Understanding the Human Brain - A new era of big neuroscience".
At the co-located exhibition, our group presented a VR-based application visualizing cytoarchitectonical data from the Human Brain.
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Today, our colleague Yuen C. Law successfully passed his Ph.D. defense and received a doctoral degree from RWTH Aachen University for his thesis on "Real-Time Simulation of B-Mode Ultrasound Images for Medical Training". Congratulations!

A few impressions of our procession through the City of Aachen and of the doctoral party will be available soon.

At this year´s "RWTH Science Night" on November, 11th in the Kármán Auditorium of RWTH Aachen University, we did not only introduced our research group but also teamed up with the Aachener Verfahrenstechnik (AVT), one of the members of the Cluster of Excellence: Tailor-Made Fuels from Biomass (CoE TMFB), presenting the visualization of a novel fuel synthesis inside a virtual biorafinery.

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After being the contest co-chair in 2014 and contest chair in 2015, Dr. Bernd Hentschel is a jury member of this year’s Scientific Visualization Contest 2016. Titled with "Particular Ensembles", the contest aims at visualizing the evolution of viscous fingers across time and multiple resolutions and study the variation of this evolution across the provided ensemble.
On Wednesday, October 26, 2016 the results of the contest will be presented at IEEE VIS 2016 in Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

The Best Poster Award of the 6th IEEE Symposium on Large Data Analysis and Visualization 2016 (LDAV 2016) was given to Dr. Tom Vierjahn for his poster entitled “Correlating Sub-Phenomena in Performance Data in the Frequency Domain”.

In this year's fifth edition of "Event Partner" (published on October, 10th), a trade magazine for event marketing, the aixCAVE of RWTH Aachen University was presented. The article is also available online (in German only).

On Saturday, October 8th, 2016, the AN/AN magazin gives an insight into four labs of RWTH Aachen University. On of these, is our Virtual Reality lab.
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In the Aachen 2025, event held on 23rd, 24th and 25th September 2016 in Aachen, we were active in two out of eight Theme Parks, namely “Production” and “Working”. Read more...

One of our service partners, the VIA Consulting & Development GmbH, is represented at the InnoTrans 2016 in Berlin (20.09 - 23.09), the leading international trade fair for transport technology with focus on five segments: Railway Technology, Railway Infrastructure, Public Transport, Interiors and Tunnel Construction.

At their boost, VIA-Con presents inter alia a short video about our common investigations regarding the benefit of 3D visualizations of timetabling and track occupancies on railways. The video is also available in our youtube profile.

Our colleague Benedikt Thelen successfully received his bachelor’s degree with his thesis on "Visualization of Particle-Traced Data" in Scientific Programming from the University of Applied Sciences Aachen. In combination with his B.Sc., he finishes his vocational education as a mathematical-technical software developer (MaTSE) with excellent grades. For these, he was honored by the Chamber of Industry and Commerce (IHK) Aachen. Congratulations!

The pvt performance visualization toolkit is released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License. Pvt was developed during the BMBF-funded project Score-E.

During her summer tour under the topic “The Future of Life in Old Age” Prof. Johanna Wanka visited within the scope of JARA-BRAIN the RWTH Aachen University Hospital on July 28th. Young scientists had the chance to present their research in short talks and demonstrations. For the Virtual Reality Group, Claudia Hänel presented her work on an interactive application to visualize the degenerative progress of a patient’s brain who suffers from corticobasal syndrome. This work was undertaken in a close cooperation with the group of Prof. Katrin Amunts (Institut für Neurowissenschaften und Medizin, Forschungszentrum Jülich) and is currently continued with the scope on the visualization of large data gathered from polarized light imaging. Within her short demonstration on a semi-immersive display system, Claudia Hänel was able to highlight the potential benefits neuroscientists can gain from novel interactive and immersive visualizations of their data.
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From July 11 – 15, 2016 the 13th International Police Workshop Photogrammetry / Laser Scanning was held at LAFP NRW (Landesamt für Ausbildung, Fortbildung und Personal-angelegenheiten NRW), at the education center in Neuss. 100 specialists for crime scene and traffic accident documentation and damage visualization, police officers, forensic specialists, scientists, surveyors and coroners from 12 nations came together for a 5-day workshop, among them Fabian Lennartz and Andrea Bönsch from the Virtual Reality Group.
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e.GO Mobile AG, headquartered on RWTH Aachen Campus, develops and constructs cost-efficient electric vehicles for short-distance travel. Since March 2016 a VR-based design optimization is integrated into the highly iterative development processes used by production researcher and e.GO Mobile CEO Professor Günther Schuh and his team.

Enlarging the methodological toolbox of the development processes by means of Virtual Reality becomes possible through a cooperation between the e.GO Mobile AG and our research and service group. Visualizing the planned vehicles in the highly immersive virtual environment of the aixCAVE enables the researchers to evaluate the vehicles’ design and discuss optimization options. A brief insight is given by a short video entitled e.GO@aixCAVE .

The Poster Honorable Mention Award of the EuroVis 2016 was given to Andrea Schnorr for her poster entitled “Tracking Space-Filling Features by Two-Step Optimization”.

The release of this 5th newsletter comes after the RASimAs project (Regional Anaesthesia Simulator and Assistant) passed the second year evaluation, again with certified success and good rate. All contributions by the partners show intensive and interdisciplinary interaction within the entire RASimAs team, composed of 11 partners from 10 European countries. The assistant was introduced and demonstrated at the International Winter Symposium on Anesthesia and Perioperative Care Trauma in Leuven. Furthermore, the evaluation of the simulator and the assistant begins soon in the clinical sites.

Download the newsletter directly from the project website or simply here (2MB) .

On May 4th 2016, a delegation of Thai-German Graduate School of Engineering (TGGS) visited our VR Lab. Besides a demonstration of our aixCAVE, options of extending the academic collaboration between TGGS and RWTH were discussed. Have a look here for some impressions.

Thanks to the existing collaboration, one Thai student already stayed with our research group for an internship and his master thesis. It was a successful time, as the work done was accepted on the IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces (paper). In August 2016, another Thai student will stay with us, again for an internship and a master thesis.

The developments in our RASimAs (Regional Anaesthesia Simulator and Assistant) EU-Project, which aims at creating a training and assistant system for a medical procedure, are nearly finished. Viktor Voski, a project partner from the Department of Anaesthesia, Uniklinik RWTH Aachen, was at SINTEF, Trondheim, Norway, and at SenseGraphics, Stockholm, Sweden to perform the final tests in the assistant and simulator prototypes before they are released to the clinical centers for evaluation.

Download the press release directly from the project website or simply here (0.2MB).

The alliance of leading Institutes of Technology in Germany (TU9) is currently presenting projects from different research sectors, such as Industry 4.0, energy systems, and entrepreneurship at the Hannover Industry Fair (25 - 29 April 2016). The RWTH Aachen University is represented by members of the Cluster of Excellence “Tailor-Made Fuels from Biomass” (CoE TMFB). Due to the rising energy demand and the limited availability of fossil energy resources, this CoE focuses on developing new alternative fuels from biomass which will not be competing with the food chain. The Virtual Reality & Immersive Visualization Group supports the TMFB’s exhibition with an VR application in which booth visitors can immerse themselves in a virtual biorefinery to see different process steps, proposed by the CoE, that are normally inaccessible.

The best technote award of the 3DUI was given to Sebastian Freitag for his paper entitled “Automatic Speed Adjustment for Travel through Immersive Virtual Environments based on Viewpoint Quality”.

Furthermore the Award Honorable Mention for Best Technote was given to Andrea Bönsch for her paper entitled “Collision Avoidance in the Presence of a Virtual Agent in Small-Scale Virtual Environments”.

Dr.-Ing. Benjamin Weyers is this years contest chair of the 3DUI contest in Greenville, South Carolina, USA.

The Virtual Reality and Immersive Visualization Group presents overall seven papers and two posters at 3DUI and IEEE VR 2016. One additional paper is presented by our cooperation partner Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, Simulation and Software Technology.

Download the new release package fromsource forge.

Members of the Regionalgruppe Informatik Aachen (RIA) der Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI), Regina as well as active participants of the RWTH Department of Computer Science accepted Prof. Manfred Nagls invitation to immersive him or herself into "Tarnen & Täuschen III", an artwork by Tim Berresheim, a main protagonist of contemporary and computer-generated art.

Besides doing research and service in the area of virtual reality and immersive visualization we educate the next generation of scientists: mathematical-technical software developers (MATSEs). Our apprentice Dirk Helmrich and our trainer Andrea Bönsch are now part of a television report about this vocational education. The complete german report can be found here, our staff can be seen in the latter third of it.