Graduate students in Texas A&M’s College of Architecture won the top two awards a fall 2007 Immersive Visualization Competition held at Texas A&M’s Immersive Visualization Center in the Halbouty Geosciences Building. The competition was sponsored by nVidia, a world-leading visual computing technology company.
Alethea Bair, an architecture Ph.D. student whose research focuses on perceptual optimization for visualization, won first place with her entry “Orbital Simulation.” She used the center’s advanced visualization capabilities to create tool for teaching students about the many different kinds of orbits that occur in space. It showed how black holes affect particles in orbit.
“For instance, if the black hole is spinning, the orbits will look different, and changing the initial position and velocity of the particle also changes its orbit,” she said. “The simulation allows anyone to play around with different parameters and discover what happens.”
She said the center’s stereo goggles, which create a 3-D effect, help viewers see the particles move in their various orbits through space.
Master of Science in Visualization student Chris Griffin placed second with his entry, “Echo City,” an animation that depicts a flight through a futuristic place. The time-based work was originally completed for his ARCH 406 studio.
“I took the 3-D elements of that project, beefed them up, recomposed some timing elements, and rendered the animation at a higher resolution and different aspect ratio to match the IVC screen,” he said.
“Echo City” can be viewed on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y8WMolIGG4
