News

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.