Where we turn ideas into insight
Software Engineering student Sandro Massa successfully defended his master thesis on July 25th 2022. Sandro worked on an “Interactive Visualization Pipeline Construction Environment for Virtual Reality Visualizations”, which included a software interface that allows one to use the functionality of the Visualisation Toolkit (VTK) in the Unity development engine. Congratulations Sandro!
Iris Reitsma successfully defended her Computational Science master thesis today, June 30th. The title of her thesis is “Simulation of Tree Root Growth in a 3D Model of Amsterdam”, and reports on the work she did together with the Amsterdam municipality on modeling the growth of root tree systems and predicting their interaction with the infrastructure in Amsterdam. The result of her work is included in 3D Amsterdam.
Jaap Kaandorp and Rob Belleman of the Informatics Institute, Computational Science lab (CSL) have developed a new method to analyze 3D images and quantify the 3D morphology of these mm-sized biomineralized structures.
Images of the growth and form of otoliths in fish were obtained with micro Computed Tomography Scanning. This project was carried out in collaboration with the University of Bologna (Quinzia Palazzo).
Otoliths are intricate and complex shaped calcium carbonate structures in fishes which play a role in sound, movement and gravity detection. Growth rings in otoliths provide information about the age of the fish and analysis of otoliths is relevant in the population biology of fishes.
In this project, master student Steven Raaijmakers developed a method for quantifying these complex shaped morphologies as part of his master thesis work in Computational Science.
A paper about this work was recently accepted for publication in Royal Society Open Science .
Rob Belleman organized the childrens lecture (“kinderlezing”) in the NEMO Science Museum on Sunday March 20. Rob took the children on a journey on what it takes to get a dinosaur dancing on your table using augmented reality.
We have a vacancy for one year for a scientific programmer to help us build an interactive system for the visualisation of human behaviour; real and simulated. See this link for more information and how to apply. Add closes March 21, 2022.
We are looking for an enthousiastic Lab Coordinator with a passion for Robotics as well as computer graphics, visualisation and VR/AR to help us make our two labs (the Robotics Lab and the Visualisation Lab) a fun, inspiring and innovative place to do research and education. See this link for more information and how to apply. Add closes March 23, 2022.
A paper submitted to the EuroXR 2021 Conference by Khalid Azougagh, Jesse van den Berge and Robert Belleman won the “Best Application Paper Award”. The committee was impressed by the demonstration that was presented during the conference and they underlined the novelty and great potential of this work to augment the treatment of young children with selective mutism. Congratulations team!
It’s a wrap! The very first course “Virtual and Augmented Reality for Good” (VAR4Good) at UvA has finished. Nine projects have been submitted by the 44 students that have joined this course.
Below are the videos made by each group to give you an impression on what they built. If you have an Oculus Quest (1 or 2) and don’t mind sideloading you can even download an installation package and try the applications yourself! Click on the title below the video to download.
In January 2021, the elective course “Virtual and Augmented Reality for Good” (VAR4Good) is taught at University of Amsterdam for the very first time. Because of the COVID-19 lockdown in the Netherlands, most of the course content has been changed into online material, but we have been granted permission by the faculty to give students access to VR headsets in the Visualisation Lab at Science Park. In the lab, students get access to five out of a total of ten Oculus Quest headsets (version 1) that we have on loan from our colleagues from Free University Amsterdam.
We have implemented multiple layers of protection to minimise the risk of infection from the shared use of headsets:
The VAR4Good course is modeled after similar courses previously taught by universities elsewhere. The objective for students in their project is to develop an interactive VR application on a subject with a societal relevance.
VAR4Good students get introduced to VR for the first time.