News

Today, our former colleague Martin Bellgardt successfully passed his Ph.D. defense and received a doctoral degree from RWTH Aachen University for his thesis on "Increasing Immersion in Machine Learning Pipelines for Mechanical Engineering". Congratulations!

At this year's IEEE VIS Conference, several contributions of our visualization group were presented. Dr. Tim Gerrits chaired the 2024 SciVis Contest and presented two accepted papers: The short paper "DaVE - A Curated Database of Visualization Examples" by Jens Koenen, Marvin Petersen, Christoph Garth and Dr. Tim Gerrits as well as the contribution to the Workshop on Uncertainty Exploring Uncertainty Visualization for Degenerate Tensors in 3D Symmetric Second-Order Tensor Field Ensembles by Tadea Schmitz and Dr. Tim Gerrits, which was awarded the best paper award. Congratulations!

One Best Paper Honorable Mention Award of the VRST 2024 was given to Sevinc Eroglu for her paper entitled “Choose Your Reference Frame Right: An Immersive Authoring Technique for Creating Reactive Behavior”.

ParaView, developed by Kitware is one of the most-used open-source visualization and analysis tools, widely used in research and industry. For the second edition of the ParaView user days, Dr. Tim Gerrits was invited to share his insights of developing and providing visualization within the academic communities.

This year's Eurographics Symposium on Visual Computing for Biologigy and Medicine VCBM in Magdeburg included a VCBM Fachgruppen Meeting with an invited presentation by Dr. Tim Gerrits on "Harnessing High Performance Infrastructure for Scientific Visualization of Medical Data".

Together with Willem-Paul Brinkmann from TU Delft University our colleague Dr. Andrea Bönsch presented her work on German and Dutch Translations of the Artificial-Social-Agent Questionnaire Instrument for Evaluating Human-Agent Interactions" at IVA 2024.

As part of the NHR4CES project, our Visualization group was invited to present current work at the 2024 NHR Conference in Darmstadt. Besides the valuable networking sessions, Dr. Tim Gerrits presented the work on DaVE in the "NHR for Users" session and the internal networking part.

Today, our colleague Andrea Bönsch successfully passed her Ph.D. defense and received a doctoral degree from RWTH Aachen University for her thesis on "Social Wayfinding Strategies to Explore Immersive Virtual Environments". Congratulations!

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Together with Anne-Hélène Olivier, Julien Pettré, and Katja Zibrek from INRIA, Rennes our colleague Andrea Bönsch organized and hosted the 8th Workshop on Virtual Humans and Crowds in Immersive Environments at IEEE Virtual Reality 2024, while also presenting some work of our research group, including a gesture authentication approach with interactive virtual agents in collabration with Daniel Rupp and results of our investigation on audiovisual coherence, asking wether embodiment of background noise sources in populated environments is a necessity in collaboration with Jonathan Ehret. Jonathan also presented our work titled StudyFramework: Comfortably Setting up and Conducting Factorial-Design Studies Using the Unreal Engine at the Open Access Tools (OAT) and Libraries for Virtual Reality Workshop.

Together with Dr. Daniel Zielasko from the University of Trier our colleague Dr. Tim Weißker presented his paper entitled "Stay Vigilant: The Threat of a Replication Crisis in VR Locomotion Research" at the 29th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST 2023). Their work was awarded with the Best Paper Award. Congratulations!

Jonathan Ehret presented his paper entitled "Who's next? Integrating Non-Verbal Turn-Taking Cues for Embodied Conversational Agents" at the 23rd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents. Furthermore, Andrea Bönsch presented two posters in the realm of virtual agents supporting scene exploration, either as conversing groups or as method for constrained navigation.

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Today, our colleague Christian Nowke successfully passed his Ph.D. defense and received a doctoral degree from the University of Trier for his thesis on "Semantic-Aware Coordinated Multiple Views for the Interactive Analysis of Neural Activity Data". Congratulations!

On Friday, May 5th, about twenty delegates from renowned companies across Germany visited us to experience the aixCAVE. This event triggered many intriguing thoughts and stimulating discussions between our researchers and guests.

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The cover of the current issue of Informatik Spektrum of the Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI) presents results of a project between the EON Energy Research Center and us on an important issue. The use of air filters in classrooms to fight the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has been and continues to be a much-discussed topic. The cover shows a visualization in our aixCAVE, enabling an analysis of the temporal and spatial dynamics of aerosol concentration for each person in the respective room. Virtual reality is proving to be an effective tool for scientists here. It demonstrates the potential risk of aerosol dispersion in enclosed spaces with many people, which can be intuitively experienced even by laypersons.

Additional information on this project is provided in the IT Center Annual Report 2020/2021, page 58f (german only).

In a nutshell, our EU project BugWright2 deals with the development of semiautonomous robots which are able to inspect and constantly monitor ship hulls of container ships for corrosion. In September, Simon Oehrl and Sebastian Pape travelled with colleagues from University of Trier to Metz, France to test their current implementations on-site. A short travel report is now available online.

Some time ago, the contemporary Belgian painter Jana Rusch approached us to explore our mutual interest in cooperating with her in the area of immersive art. Our colleagues Sevinc Eroglu and Patric Schmitz directly came up with many ideas. Thus, they teamed up with Jana and created Rilievo, a virtual authoring environment for artistic creation in VR, enabling Jana to convert her 2D drawings effortless into 3D volumetric representations while relief sculpting allows volume manipulations. This successful cooperation and the resulting framework have now been presented in the press. Click here for the online article (in German only).

Ali Can Demiralp presented his research paper on "Performance Assessment of Diffusive Load Balancing for Distributed Particle Advection" during the 30. International Conference in Central Europe on Computer Graphics, Visualization, and Computer Vision 2022 (WSCG2022).

The Virtual Humans and Crowds in Immersive Environments (VHCIE) is a half-day workshop associated with the IEEE VR conference. In 2022, Andrea Bönsch teamed up with colleagues from France to organize the 7th edition of the workshop. During the workshop, her master student Daniel Rupp presented their work-in-progress on "An Embodied Conversational Agent Supporting Scene Exploration by Switching between Guiding and Accompanying", while her colleague Jonathan Ehret presented insights on "Natural Turn-Taking with Embodied Conversational Agents".

Andrea Bönsch presented a paper at the 21th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents. Additionally, her student David Hashem submitted a GALA video showcasing the respective application of a virtual museum's curator who either guides the user or accompanies the user on his or free exploration. The video won the ACM IVA 2021 GALA Audience Award. Congratulations!

Jonathan Ehret presented joined work with the RWTH Institute for Hearing Technology and Acoustics and the Cologne IfL Phonetik on the Influence of Prosody and Embodiment on the Perceived Naturalness of a Conversational Agents’ Speech. During the peer-reviewing process, the paper was invited and accepted to the Journal Transactions on Applied Perception (TAP). Congratulations!

Andrea Bönsch presented a poster on Indirect User Guidance by Pedestrians in Virtual Environments during the International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence and Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments (ICAT-EGVE 2021).

Prof. Reinhard Windoffer of the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Anatomy (MOCA) presented his group's research on Keratin intermediate filaments. Our group supported this work with an immersive visualization of the cytoskeletons.

Marcel Krüger gave a talk introducing "Insite - A Pipeline for the Interactive Analysis of Neuronal Network Simulations via NEST, TVB, and ARBOR" on the Med&BioVis Workshop of GI Fachgruppe Visual Computing in Biology and Medicine.

Our group was involved in three presentations at this year's DAGA, 47th Annual Conference on Acoustics. While Jonathan Ehret talked about "Speech Source Directivity for Embodied Conversational Agents", our colleagues from RWTH Institute for Hearing Technology and Acoustics presented joint work on "Prosodic and Visual Naturalness of Dialogs Presented by Conversational Virtual Agents" and our AUDICTIVE project on listening to, and remembering conversations between two talkers.

Today, our colleague Claudia Hänel successfully passed her Ph.D. defense and received a doctoral degree from RWTH Aachen University for her thesis on "Methods for Immersive Visual Analysis of Structural Brain Data". Congratulations!

Sebastian Pape and Sevinc Eroglu just presented their research at IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces 2021, which will end tomorrow. Sebastian's poster deals with a Virtual Optical Bench as a VR learning tool for optical design, while Sevinc's paper on design and evaluation of a free-hand VR-based authoring environment for automated vehicle testing was even nominated for the Best Paper Award.

Today, our colleague Andrea Schnorr successfully passed her Ph.D. defense and received a doctoral degree from RWTH Aachen University for her thesis on "Feature Tracking for Space-Filling Structures". Congratulations!

The current issue of the Science Magazine RWTH THEMEN (2/2020) presents various research conducted in the RWTH's profile area „Information & Communication Technology“. Together with Prof. Michael Vorländer and Prof. Janina Fels, both experts in the area of Virtual Acoustics, we provide insight into our research in the realm of Social Virtual Reality: To convincingly represent conversational interaction partners, VAs need to plausibly mimic visual and acoustic human behavior. In the article we focus on the realism of the acoustic reproduction which can be achieved by applying dynamic directivity as well as by taking the phoneme-dependent characteristics of the spoken word into account.

Read the complete article here, page 12-17.

Jonathan Ehret and Andrea Bönsch present four papers at the current 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents. Additionally, Andrea is co-author on a collaborative work with colleagues from, i.a., Dutch and Australia, which is nominated for the Best Paper Award.

If you are interested in our work, please take a look at our updated research and service projects. For example, learn more about the new EU project BugWright or the immersive visualization of cytoskeletons.

Today, our colleague Sascha Gebhardt successfully passed his Ph.D. defense and received a doctoral degree from RWTH Aachen University for his thesis on "Visual Analysis of Multi-dimensional Metamodels for Manufacturing Processess". Congratulations!

Today, our colleague Daniel Zielasko successfully passed his Ph.D. defense and received a doctoral degree from RWTH Aachen University for his thesis on "DeskVR: Seamless Integration of Virtual Reality into Desk-based Data Analysis Workflows". Congratulations!

Networking is tool. Thus, the highly interdisciplinary Master program Networked Production Engineering” (NPE) enables students to obtain technology-related qualifications for our increasingly networked world of work. Thereby three specialization are offered: Additive Manufacturing, Smart Factory, and E-Mobility. Obviously, Virtual Reality as smart technology - to take production to the networked level - is one of many important aspects here.

Interested in finding out more? Watch NPE's imagefilm here and see our aixCAVE at 1:09.

Today, our colleague Sebastian Pick successfully passed his Ph.D. defense and received a doctoral degree from RWTH Aachen University for his thesis on "Interactive Data Annotation for Virtual Reality Applications". Congratulations!

At this year's International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) exhibition in Frankfurt, scientists of JARA-HPC have presented an application based on Unreal Engine for visualizing a direct numerical simulation of early flame kernel development. In the interactive exhibit, the visitors of the booth were provided with stereo glasses and flysticks to interactively explore the combustion simulation projected through the display wall. The application has gathered interest from a wide range of people, ranging from youth interested in utilization of game engines for scientific visualization, to domain scientists asking the specifics of the direct numerical simulation in display. The responses were overall positive, and included valuable feedback for further development. A particular theme was extension of the immersive visualization environment to arbitrary datasets.

The astronauts Christopher J. Cassidy (US) and Jeremy R. Hansen (Canada) are preparing for one of the most demanding missions in space: Replacing the cooling system at the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer AMS-02 on the International Space Station ISS in at least five intensive space operations.
As the new cooling system was developed by RWTH, in close collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT, NASA, and other partners, the astronauts visited Aachen to become familiar with the cooling system's technology. During their stay, they also visited our aixCAVE to experience a full-scale, virtual AMS-02, a demo prepared by Prof. Roßmann's Institute for Man-Machine Interaction.
News regarding this spectacular visit can, e.g., be found here (University news: visit announcement), here (University news: visit retrospective) and here (video by Aachener Nachrichten, German).

By the end of the lecture period, we had to say goodbye to our dear friend and colleague Benjamin Weyers. For more than five years, he significantly committed to our group’s research and teaching activities with a very high personal involvement. Now, Benjamin took over a junior professorship for Human-Computer Interaction at the Department IV - Computer Science at the University of Trier. We will miss him. However, we wish him best of luck for his new endeavor and the new tasks and challenges ahead.

Our warmest congratulations, Jun.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Benjamin Weyers!

... is ready for take-off and introduces itself to the public with a short video clip on youtube. Of course, VR is involved here as well - as one digital tool used in the development stage to gain initial insights.

Today, our colleague Sebastian Freitag successfully passed his Ph.D. defense and received a doctoral degree from RWTH Aachen University for his thesis on "Supported Navigation in Immersive Virtual Environments". Congratulations!

Today we had to say goodbye to our dear friend and colleague Tom Vierjahn. After four years of significant commitment and high personal involvement in our group’s research and teaching activities, Tom now takes over professorship at the Department of Business Studies and Information Technology at the Westphalian University of Applied Sciences in Bocholt. We will sadly miss him in Aachen, however, we wish him much fun and all the best for the new tasks and challenges ahead.

Our warmest congratulations, Prof. Dr. Tom Vierjahn!

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At this year's International Supercomputing Conference from June 24 - 28, 2018 in Frankfurt scientists of the JARA-HPC presented latest research results at the exhibition and organized a workshop on In Situ Visualization.

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Matt Larsen is a staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Oregon in 2016. He is the primary developer for the ASCENT in situ library, as well as a key contributor to the VTK-m library and the VisIt visualization software. Matt's research interests include rendering for visualization, performance modeling for visualization, and many-core architectures.

Janine Bennett (Sandia National Lab, CA), Hank Childs (University of Oregon), Christoph Garth (TU Kaiserslautern), and Bernd Hentschel jointly organized a Dagstuhl Seminar on "In Situ Visualization for Computational Science". Being held in Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany between 2-6 July, the seminar brought together 39 experts from the fields of computational science, high-performance computing, and large-scale data visualization in order to discuss challenges and research opportunities with respect to highly scalable in situ visualization methods. Over the course of four and a half days, participants discussed a variety of topics in small working groups. The results of these discussions will be disseminated as a Dagstuhl Report, which outlines the current state of the field as well as a mid-term research agenda. Find more info at https://www.dagstuhl.de/de/programm/kalender/semhp/?semnr=18271.

Kenneth Moreland (Sandia National Labs, CA), Guido Reina (Univ. Stuttgart), Thomas Theussl (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia), and Tom Vierjahn jointly organized the 3rd "Workshop on in situ visualization: Introduction and Applications” at this year’s ISC in Frankfurt. WOIV provides a venue for speakers to share practical expertise and experience with in situ visualization approaches. This year’s workshop additionally featured approaches that either did not work at all or did not live up to their expectations. It, therefore, provided first-hand reports on lessons learned. A total of 8 paper talks and 4 invited presentation provided participants with current, deep insights into the field. The accepted papers will be published in the ISC Workshop proceedings edition of the Springer Lecture Notes on Computer Science. Find more info at http://www.woiv.org.

Bernd Hentschel serves on the International Program Committee of the IEEE Symposium on Large Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV'18). Addressing the need for scalable visualization and analysis algorithms, LDAV is a major forum for original work in this area. This year's edition will be co-located to IEEE VIS in Berlin, Germany and will be held on October 21, 2018. Find more info at http://ldav.org/.

Andrea Bönsch gave an invited talk at the International Symposium Virtual Reality in Psychotherapy Research, Regensburg. During this symposium, the new multisensory laboratory (CAVE) at the Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy by Prof. Andreas Mühlberger, University Regensburg, was ceremonially inaugurated. As this CAVE was operated by our group here at RWTH Aachen University till 2011, it is great to know that it now has a new home and intended purpose at Regensburg. We wish Prof. Mühlberger and his research group a lot of success in their research on human behavior conducted by means of the new laboratory.

The discipline of Virtual Reality is on its way towards a serious and powerful tool in scientific and industrial applications. Especially for the latter, it offers new and innovative ways in areas like marketing, product development, and training.

To answer and discuss questions on the integration into existing processes, hardware and software solutions, and costs incurred, we teamed up with the TEMA Technologie Marketing AG and organized the first congress exhibition "VR in Industry" in July 2017. The talks about business cases from industry and insights into academic research as well as an exhibition with several live demonstrations were well received by about 200 attendees.

Due to the ongoing active and high interest, a second congress exhibition will take place on July 4th, 2018. The event offers the possibility to learn about the latest developments, exchange know-how, and forge new business relationships. More information can be found under https://vr-in-industry.de.

We look forward to seeing you!

Bernd Hentschel served as symposium chair of this year's Eurographics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization (EGPGV'18). Hank Childs and Fernando Cucchietti served as paper chairs, and Kristi Belcher took the role as student program chair. EGPGV was held on June 4, 2018 in Brno, Czech Republic, co-located with the EG/VGTC EuroVis conference. Each year, EGPGV provides a forum for original research in the areas of parallel methods for computer graphics and visualization. This year, we received 23 submissions out of which an international program committee selected 10 for publication and presentation at the symposium. A keynote adress was given by Markus Hadwiger from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Find more info at http://egpgv.cs.uoregon.edu.

Did you miss the IEEE VR Conference Banquet in March 2018? No problem, the entertaining keynote given by Oliver Riedel and Matthias Bues is now online. Enjoy!

Our colleagues Benjamin Weyers and Daniel Zielasko teamed up with Thiess Pfeiffer from University Bielefeld and Markus Funk from TU Darmstadt to organize a workshop in conjunction with the German GI conference Mensch und Computer (MuC), held in Dresden in September 2018. The one-day workshop entitled “Workshop on VR and AR in Everyday Context” (VARECo) focuses on the challenges raised by the increased occurrence of VR consumer hardware, e.g., long-term use of HMDs or simple context creation, as well as on potential solutions. The call for papers is out, with deadline June, 6th 2018.

The Virtual Reality and Immersive Visualization Group decisively contributes to this year‘s IEEE Virtual Reality, starting on Sunday, March 18th, in Tübingen, Germany. Prof. Torsten W. Kuhlen is serving as General Chair, Dr. Benjamin Weyers as 3DUI Contest Chair and as Tutorial Chair, and Dr. Tom Vierjahn as Workshop Chair. In addition, the group presents overall six papers.

Andrea Bönsch is serving on the International Program Committee for CASA2018, which will take place in Beijing, China. CASA is the oldest international conference in computer animation and social agents in the world.

Today, our colleague Dominik Rausch successfully passed his Ph.D. defense and received a doctoral degree from RWTH Aachen University for his thesis on "Modal Sound Synthesis for Interactive Virtual Environments". Congratulations!

Bernd Hentschel serves on the International Program Committee of the EG/VGTC EuroVis conference 2018. EuroVis is the premier European forum for original research in the field of data visualization and visual analytics. The 2018 edition will mark the 20th anniversary of the conference. It will be held in Brno, Czech Republic in the week of 4-7 June, 2018. More info is available at https://www.eurovis2018.org/.

By means of a yearly award, the profile area "Information and Communication Technology" at RWTH Aachen University honors young researchers who contribute significantly to the ICT-related research and show the potential to further improve the international visibility of ICT research at RWTH Aachen University. Andrea Bönsch was selected by the Steering Committee of the profile area ICT as one of the recipient of the 2017 ICT Young Researcher Award. The award is donated with 3000 Euro, supporting her research career.
Congratulations!

Due to the current hype of the discipline of Virtual Reality (VR) evoked by top-quality and affordable VR devices on the markets, some issues arise in Industry: How can VR be optimally integrated into the existing processes? Which hardware and software are required? Which costs are incurred for a company?

To answer these questions we teamed up with the TEMA Technologie Marketing AG, and organized as well as partially hosted "The VR in Industry Days in Aachen" on July, 4th to 5th.

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At this year's International Supercomputing Conference from June 18 - 22, 2017 scientists of the JARA-HPC presented latest research results at the exhibition.

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The Honorable Mention for the best Short Paper of the 19th EG/VGTC Conference on Visualization (EuroVis 2017) was given to Claudia Hänel and Ali Can Demiralp for their paper entitled "Interactive Level-of-Detail Visualization of 3D Polarized Light Imaging Data Using Spherical Harmonics".

The Profile Area Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) plays an important role in all global challenges the institutional strategy of RWTH Aachen University addresses. Major topics of ICT such as Smart Systems, eHealth & AAL, Wireless Communication or Data Mining have an enormous research potential and a considerable practical relevance. However, the challenges occurring in this fields can only be solved on an interdisciplinary level. Therefore, the RWTH Aachen University founded the interdisciplinary Profile Area ICT with the respective Project House ICT Foundations of a Digitized Industry, Economy, and Society. Both, the Visual Computing Institute as well as the Chair of Computer Science 12, are members of this Project House with, in total, three projects.

In order to share and discuss ICT related information, the Profile Area ICT now has a LinkedIn presence. So, visit our profile and follow us on LinkedIn.

Bernd Hentschel spent one month (April 2017) abroad by Hank Childs, an Associate Professor in the Computer and Information Science Department at the University of Oregon, USA, through a Theodore-von-Kármán Fellowship for Outgoing Scientists. Congratulations!

Virtual Reality offers a wide range of new and innovative ways for the industry in areas like product development, product presentations or training courses.

But - how can VR be optimally integrated into the existing processes, which hardware and software are required and which costs are incurred for a company?

To answer these questions we teamed up with the TEMA Technologie Marketing AG, in order to organize and host The VR in Industry Days in Aachen on July, 4th to 5th. The varied conference program contains business cases and live demonstrations, presented by industrial partners as well as academic VR experts.

More information can be found on the respective event's website:
https://vr-in-industry.de.

We look forward to seeing you!

Today, our colleague Thomas Beer successfully passed his Ph.D. defense and received a doctoral degree from RWTH Aachen University for his thesis on "Plattform zur kollaborativen Simulation und Visualisierung von Szenarien des Integrative Computational Engineering ". Congratulations!

ISC 2017 accepted the second edition of the "ISC Workshop on in situ visualization”. Tom Vierjahn will be one of the co-chairs together with Guido Reina, Steffen Frey (both Univ. Stuttgart), and Gunther Weber (LBNL). The submission system is open …

Link: www.woiv.org
Call for Papers: Read more...

We are very happy to announce, that next year’s 3DUI and IEEE VR will be located in Reutlingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. We are particularly pleased that Torsten W. Kuhlen is one of the conference co-chairs together with Betty Mohler (Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tuebingen, Germany), Evan Suma Rosenberg (University of Southern California, Institute of Creative Technologies, California) and Matthias Bues (Frauenhofer IAO, Stuttgart, Germany).

We look forward to seeing you in Reutlingen in March 2018!

Our group presented three papers at 3DUI and three workshop papers as well as six posters at IEEE VR 2017 in Los Angeles, California, USA on March 18-22.

Furthermore, Benjamin Weyers continued his engagement for the 3DUI contest: He was one of the co-chairs together with Rongkai Guo (Kennesaw State University, USA) and Ryan R. McMahan (University of Texas in Dallas, USA).

Our efforts to integrate virtual humans into complex scientific and technical applications are partially funded by the project house ICT Foundations of a Digitized Industry, Economy, and Society, RWTH Aachen University. More information can be found here.

Congratulations to our colleagues Prof. Torsten W. Kuhlen and Dominik Rausch for winning the Teaching Award in the category "Project 2016" for the project Virtual Sketching on this year’s RWTHtransparent. During his diploma thesis in 2008, Dominik Rausch developed a Virtual Reality-based tool for sketching in immersive virtual environments and later on extended in an interdisciplinary collaboration with the Department of Visual Design (Prof. Thomas H. Schmitz, Hannah Groninger). It incorporates the advantages of classical open, undetermined hand-drawn sketches and 3D computer drafts: the drawer is immersed in his draft or model inside the aixCAVE at RWTH Aachen. He can freely move and look around in the virtual scenery and sketch 3D strokes directly into the environment using tracked input devices.
In the RWTH Aachen University’s youtube video one can receive an impression of the Sketching application and the official University News can be found here.

Besides the awarded project, which could be tested in an HMD-Version during the exhibition, our group teamed up with collaboration partners in order to exhibit three more current research projects at information stands during the RWTHtransparent’s exhibition. The projects presented range from brain visualization over the melting process of pressure casting to cultural heritage.

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.

Download it for free on our project page.

The second IT Center Info Day at January, 20th has the theme "eScience" and will focus on research data management. The day's programme can be found online in the IT Center Web or as PDF download - both in german.

On December 1st, the mayor of Aachen Marcel Philipp hosted the attunement for the Future Lab 2016. The event gave insight into the close cooperation between the IT Center, the Visual Computing Institute (both RWTH Aachen University) and the local artist Tim Berresheim.
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At this year´s International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC15) from November, 15th until 20th in Austin (Texas,USA) scientists of JARA-HPC introduced the field of activity and the application opportunities of computer simulation and highly parallel computations.
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The best paper award of the Workshop on Virtual Reality Interaction and Physical Simulation was given to Thomas Knott and Torsten Kuhlen for their paper entitled “Accurate Contact Modeling for Multi-rate Single-point Haptic Rendering of Static and Deformable Environments”.
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We participate in the RASimAs project (Regional Anaesthesia Simulator and Assistant) aiming at providing a virtual reality simulator and assistant to doctors performing regional anaesthesia by developing the patient-specific Virtual Physiological Human models.
In November 2015 the fourth newsletter has been released. Download it directly from the project website or simply here (2MB) .

After being the contest co-chair for the IEEE Scientific Visualization Contest in 2014,
Dr. Bernd Hentschel is this years contest chair. Titled with "Petascale Cosmological Simulations", the contest aims at developing a visualization tool for exploring Dark Sky Simulation data.

On Thursday, October 29, 2015 Bernd Hentschel will officially announce the results at IEEE VIS 2015 in Chicago, Illinois, USA.

For his exhibition at the Ludwig Forum, artist Tim Berresheim drew on the possibilities offered by RWTH's aixCAVE, an immersive virtual reality environment. His artwork "Tarnen & Täuschen III" was enliven by master student Dennis Scully (supervisors: Profs Kuhlen and Kobbelt) resulting in an intensely experience for everybody. A short insight is given by our youtube video.

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At this year's JARA Forum on October, 1st in Berlin scientists of JARA-HPC introduced the field of activity and the application opportunities of computer simulation and highly parallel computations. Member of the JARA-HPC CSG "Immersive Visualization" presented latest research results of the new In-situ Visualization of Multiphase Jet Simulations as well as of the Visualization of Simulated Neural Brain Activity.
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The Visual Computing Institute organizes this year's VMV & GCPR conferences which will take place in parallel on October 07-09, 2015. For more information, please visit the official joint website.

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At this year's ISC High Performance exhibition from July 12 - 16, 2015 in Frankfurt scientists of the JARA-HPC CSG "Immersive Visualization" presented latest research results of the new In-situ Visualization of Multiphase Jet Simulations.
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At the conference "Shape Modeling International 2015" in Lille, France, the article by Tom Vierjahn (Virtual Reality Group, RWTH Aachen University) and Klaus Hinrichs (Visualisation and Computer Graphics Research Group, WWU Münster) received the best paper award.
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