News

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".