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Third projects week, Nov 07 - Nov 11

Seminar, Nov 07, 14:15 h, Ongoing diploma thesis
BSP-Trees, Jens Schöbel

Wednesday EXCURSION to the University of Stuttgart
Nov 09, Virtual Reality at HLRS (CAVE) and Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism

This time we met at Stuttgart University and visited the High Performance Computing Center (HLRS) in the morning. In the afternoon, we went to the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, which is located downtown.

After a nice walk through a more and also less boring architecture of a modern university campus, we were awaited around 10:30 h at the Visualization Center of the HLRS.

We were welcomed by Uwe Wössner, head of the Visualization Center, who showed us various ongoing projects. Starting with real 3D-models of a dance floor, realized by students of architecture, he explained the function of markers. These black and white images show a combination of squares which can be identified by image recognition and yield the orientation of the objects in 3D space. Augmented reality works in a similar way: the real object, viewed through the camera, is recognized by the markers and combined with simulated results in the final image of some head mounted display (HMD). As an example we were shown a toy car in combination with a simulated flow field and two passengers inside. However, the most impressive show was with Virtual Reality (VR) in the so-called CAVE.

Everybody got shutter glasses for the active stereo used with the VR facility. But only the glasses with a construction of some white little balls can be located by the optical tracking system as the reference point of the viewer for whom the stereo effect is calculated. The 3D pointer has a similar reference system such that location and orientation of this 3D mouse can be tracked and thereby used for navigation within a 3D world. Our virtual tour started with a simulation of a flow field within a hydroelectric power plant in Nepal. We were placed directly in the middle of a turbulent vortex. Then we traveled through a nearby Neckar power plant: we had to avoid the virtual collision with simulated particles in the water! Next we flew up to the sky and watched the plant from above. Then we could choose from different places in the world, where we could enter the various show rooms of Daimler-Benz, a sponsor of the VR at HLRS. And last not least we saw some medical applications with datasets from the visible human.

Finally we had to hurry to our next appointment, grabbing some lunch at the main station, since we were awaited at 14:00 h at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism. Mr Hechinger of the Institute of Presentation and Design (IDG 1), guided us through the model making studios. His main concern is in educating the future architects in a goal-orientated handling of models. The material itself should be used as a medium of information. If the volume of the architecture shall be presented, this can be done with various nicely colored wooden elements. But the architect shall use a different material for the presentation of the inner structure or the ideal function. Various machines for processing wood or plexiglass are already computer aided such that every student likes to work with these easing machines. But since architecture has to do with a material world, the architect should not forget about the haptic qualities and the technical requirements.

However, this experience was again followed by a guided tour through the students computer pool by Benjamin Späth, a member of the IT staff of the casino. In our modern times model making also comprises education in handling CAD software especially designed for the purposes of architects. In the casino computer pool, hundreds of PCs offer a fantastic infrastructure for generating virtual models. These models can be viewed at big projection boards with passive stereo and sound effects. Especialy the sound makes these models extremly realistic since more than the visual sense is addressed and so the whole human is involved in the virtual world. As a challenge, they think about acustic simulation according to the sound reflections of the designed model, which becomes tremendously interesting for noise protection or sound absorption.

After a shopping tour through the book shops with literature on architecture, we finally returned to Heidelberg.

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
Project work	Project work	HLRS, CAVE	Project work	Project work
Seminar U 014	Project work	Stuttgart, Faculty of Architecture	Project work	Project work