Fall 2023 Research Opportunities
If you're looking to deepen your immersive media skills outside of class, there are opportunities to volunteer for projects being conducted by IMD and other UMD faculty. These opportunities allow you to see how IM methods are applied to professional problems, learn more about the technologies, and develop your resume.
Check out the list below, and if you're interested, fill out the Google form with your priorities and contact information.
NASA VALIXR (Shaders). In collaboration with the AR/VR group at NASA Goddard, undergraduate IMD and CS majors have been working on the VALIXR project to visualize weather simulation data in virtual reality. The Unity based system is intended to allow scientists to track weather events, like hurricanes, through the data. One team of UMD students is working to accelerate the visualization of large point clouds of weather data in Unity using Unity-native HLSL GPU shaders. This approach will allow all the acceleration to take place inside of Unity. Faculty leads are Daniel Brown of IMD, and Kaur Kullman of UMBC. This project would fit students interested in learning more about intensive graphics programming and shaders.
NASA VALIXR (Neural nets). Another approach for very large point clouds is to render the point clouds into images in a separate program from Unity, using a neural nets compression approach, and then stream those images into Unity for the VR display. Prof. Matthias Zwicker is supervising a graduate student in creating the neural net algorithm, while IMD Faculty Research Assistant Daniel Brown holds weekly meetings with students to develop the two approaches, who are This project would fit those interested in learning more about general Unity programming.
NASA MRET. In the original collaborative project with NASA, IMD is working with the same group to enhance and develop the Mixed Reality Engineering Toolkit (MRET). MRET is a open sources Unity framework for using VR and AR for scientific and engineering applications throughout NASA, including VALIXR. Faculty leads are Daniel Brown and Roger Eastman of IMD. Students interested in exploring engineering applications of VR and general Unity programming could benefit from this experience.
NASA Ocean. We're starting a new project with a NASA Goddard communications team to create immersive media to promote NASA's mission to planet Earth. NASA satellites image the Earth's oceans every day to assist scientists in tracking the conditions and health of the oceans, and a new satellite is going up in 2024 that will focus on this task. The PACE (Plankon, Aerosols, Carbon and Ecology) will include an advance, hyperspectral camera that views the oceans in regular red, green and blue wavelengths, but also 200 more wavelengths from the infrared to ultraviolet. The current plan is to create a large scale projective artistic visualization to communicate the concepts and science to a general audience. Faculty leads are Mollye Bendell of Art, Myungin Lee of IMD, and Ruth West of the University of North Texas. This project would fit students interested in creating interactive projective installations with NASA data.
Mocap for Arts. IMD is establishing a new cross-campus lab in motion capture for the arts, to apply and develop a range of technologies that can track human motion as part of installations, performances, and other artistic works. We're working with faculty in the Dance and Art departments on how to apply mocap tech, and with Computer Science faculty on how to advance and develop it. We're particularly interested in markerless mocap so users can wear ordinary clothing without markers or sensors, from free open source systems for a single webcam, to advanced professional systems with multiple cameras. Faculty leads are Kate Ladenheim of Dance, and Cornelia Furmuller of CS. This project would fit students interested in technical mocap research, or in applying mocap to live interactive installations or performances.
AR for Digital Heritage. Faculty in Architecture, Art History and Archeology work to digitally capture historic sites to preserve their architectural and cultural features. In this project, UMD faculty are working with the Montgomery County Parks Department to 3D scan and otherwise document the historic black heritage site of Oakley Cabin, and develop XR guides to explain and visualize the cabin for the public. Faculty leads are Stefan Woehlke of Architecture/Archeology, and Quint Gregory of Art History. This project would fit students interested in large scale 3D scanning and digital heritage projects.