Today, our colleague Sebastian Pick successfully passed his Ph.D. defense and received a doctoral degree from RWTH Aachen University for his thesis on "Interactive Data Annotation for Virtual Reality Applications". Congratulations!

At this year's International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) exhibition in Frankfurt, scientists of JARA-HPC have presented an application based on Unreal Engine for visualizing a direct numerical simulation of early flame kernel development. In the interactive exhibit, the visitors of the booth were provided with stereo glasses and flysticks to interactively explore the combustion simulation projected through the display wall. The application has gathered interest from a wide range of people, ranging from youth interested in utilization of game engines for scientific visualization, to domain scientists asking the specifics of the direct numerical simulation in display. The responses were overall positive, and included valuable feedback for further development. A particular theme was extension of the immersive visualization environment to arbitrary datasets.

The astronauts Christopher J. Cassidy (US) and Jeremy R. Hansen (Canada) are preparing for one of the most demanding missions in space: Replacing the cooling system at the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer AMS-02 on the International Space Station ISS in at least five intensive space operations.
As the new cooling system was developed by RWTH, in close collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT, NASA, and other partners, the astronauts visited Aachen to become familiar with the cooling system's technology. During their stay, they also visited our aixCAVE to experience a full-scale, virtual AMS-02, a demo prepared by Prof. Roßmann's Institute for Man-Machine Interaction.
News regarding this spectacular visit can, e.g., be found here (University news: visit announcement), here (University news: visit retrospective) and here (video by Aachener Nachrichten, German).

Prof. Kobbelt has been named RWTH Fellow for his outstanding research performance and his great merits for RWTH Aachen University.

By the end of the lecture period, we had to say goodbye to our dear friend and colleague Benjamin Weyers. For more than five years, he significantly committed to our group’s research and teaching activities with a very high personal involvement. Now, Benjamin took over a junior professorship for Human-Computer Interaction at the Department IV - Computer Science at the University of Trier. We will miss him. However, we wish him best of luck for his new endeavor and the new tasks and challenges ahead.

Our warmest congratulations, Jun.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Benjamin Weyers!

... is ready for take-off and introduces itself to the public with a short video clip on youtube. Of course, VR is involved here as well - as one digital tool used in the development stage to gain initial insights.