Annual Report 2010 - Fachgruppe Informatik an der RWTH Aachen ...

Since recently, our research is also focusing on VR-based simulators in medicine. In contrast
to other research groups mainly working on simulators for minimal invasive surgery, we are
concentrating more on open surgery procedures. The challenge here is to simulate not only
deformable objects in real time, but to – among others – also provide methods which allow
for an interactive and at the same time stable cutting through simulated tissue. Other
interesting research activities are related to an already long-standing collaboration with
(neuro-) psychologists, who are using VR-based experimental setups for brain research. Lust
but not least, thanks to an excellent collaboration with the Institute of Technical Acoustics,
Professor Vorländer, we claim to have one of the most sophisticated VR audio rendering
systems ever developed.
Our teaching curriculum comprises a Virtual Reality lecture always held in winter term, as
well as a seminar on advanced VR topics and a practical course on VR in summer term. We
are also engaged in the organization of the Virtual Reality Center Aachen (VRCA), which is
an interdisciplinary non-profit network founded by Christian Bischof and Torsten Kuhlen in
2000 in order to further bundle and expand the VR activities at RWTH and the region of
Aachen. Today, more than 40 RWTH Professors and 15 companies as well as external
research institutions are organized in the VRCA, carrying out more than 50 research projects.
On the national level, Torsten Kuhlen is the co-speaker of the “Fachgruppe Virtual &
Augmented Reality” as a sub-organization of the “Gesellschaft für Informatik”. The goal of
this section is to bundle the expertise of the various German-speaking research groups in
academia as well as industry.
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