“The ESS group is experimenting with taking advantage of the falling prices of 3D display and computer hardware to develop an immersive visualization system optimized for solving geologic problems. The current IO components of the system would include:
- PC workstation with stereo vision capability,
- Kinect, and
- Data glove (e.g. http://www.vrealities.com/
dg5glove.html )
This position would be paid. In addition, we have about a $5k budget to buy additional hardware (e.g. see http://www.oculusvr.com/ )
Although the project would start with a project to optimally display 3d geologic structure(s) the ultimate goal of the system would be to move beyond the passive display of spatial-temporal data and emphasize the interactive refinement of complex geologic models. This effort could represent an opportunity for one of your more advanced senior students to act as a ‘consultant’ on the project. He would experience a real world project in the sense that:
- She would have clients who would view computer programing has a means to an end,
- Be exposed to different programing environment (e.g.Python),
- Stretch his CS expertise on problems where the answer is not in the back of the book, and
- Have to deal with real world trade offs (e.g. buy a bigger monitor and just upgrade an older PC or buy a small monitor and a new PC ).
Past collaborations between geologists with interesting problems and computer scientists have produced interesting results (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?
The student should expect to work under Windows and use the Python programing language.
For more info, contact Gregg, at gregg@hiker.org”