25 RWTH professors from the field of materials and production engineering, along with several affiliated institutes and Fraunhofer institutions, are involved in the Cluster of Excellence “Integrative Production Technology for High-Wage Countries.” The cluster investigates production technologies with the help of which the competitive disadvantage of high-wage countries in production can be overcome. more

AICES represents a new doctoral program under the auspices of the Excellence Initiative of the German state and federal governments. RWTH Aachen University—one of the leading technical universities in Europe—has been establishing educational structures to meet the future research challenges in computational engineering science (CES). AICES is spearheaded by 15 RWTH institutes from 4 departments, and it includes participation from Forschungszentrum Jülich  and the Max Planck Institute for Iron Research in Düsseldorf. The VR Group at the IT Center of RWTH Aachen University develops innovative methods of interactive visualization in order to establish an intuitive analysis of the conducted simulations within the scope of the AICES projects. more

Within the Human Brain Project (HBP) started in October 2013, the Virtual Reality Group is leading a work package “Interactive Visualization, Analysis, and Control”. The work package is part of the HBP subproject “Interactive Supercomputing” headed by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, and includes partners from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, the Swiss Supercomputing Centre, the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, and the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos de Madrid. Furthermore, the KAUST University in Saudi Arabia will serve as an associate partner in this work package. more

In  the second phase of the Cluster of Excellence “Integrative Production Technology for High-Wage Countries” the Virtual Production Intelligence (VPI) platform is being developed. It is a holistic and integrative concept for the support of collaborative planning, monitoring and control of core processes within production and product development in various application fields. In the context of the VPI we are developing a tool for the explorative visualization of multi-dimensional meta-model data, which is based on the concept of hyperslices, linked with a 3D volume representation. The tool is applicable to various scenarios of multi-dimensional data analysis, but the concrete use case in the current project is to find ideal configuration parameters for laser cutting machines in the context of factory planning. more

While visual feedback is often the main focus in Virtual Environments, sound is another important modality. Auditory feedback can enhance the immersion and believability of virtual scenes. However, the common approach of using pre-recorded sound samples is often not feasible for highly interactive environments, because too many sounds would have to be recorded or designed upfront. Especially with physically simulated objects, a lot of sounds are generated by collisions between objects. The sound of such collisions depends on different factors: the material and shape of the objects, as well as the positions, strength and temporal distribution of the collision forces. Especially the latter aspects are difficult to reproduce with sound samples. more

The Jülich-Aachen Research Alliance, JARA for short, a cooperation between RWTH Aachen University and Forschungszentrum Jülich, provides a top-level research environment that is in the top international league and is attractive to the brightest researchers worldwide. In five sections, JARA conducts research  in Translational Brain Medicine , Nuclear and Particle Physics , Future Information Technologies, High-Performance Computing, and Sustainable Energy.

The RWTH Aachen IT Center provides support to the JARA-HPC section, which first and foremost aims to contribute to making full use of the opportunities offered by high-performance computers and computer simulations to address current research issues. Furthermore, it seeks to provide a joint infrastructure for research and teaching in the fields of high-performance computing and visualization.  more

The aim of this project is to gather European experts from very diverse fields, from computer sciences to anesthesiology, to bring an innovative tool in the hands of the medical doctors to perform safer regional anesthesia for the patient at reduced cost for the society. For that purpose, a virtual reality simulator and assistant will be developed, providing an innovative way for medical doctors to train extensively on virtual patients and to be assisted by additional patient-specific information during the procedure. The project started on 1st of November 2013 for three years, gathers experts from 10 European countries in a consortium of 14 academic, industrial and clinical partners. more

This project aims at developing a specialized training system dedicated to the teaching of a major maxillofacial surgery procedure based on Virtual Reality technology. The medical procedure of interest, the bilateral sagittal split osteotomy (BSSO), allows the displacement of the lower jaw in all three spatial dimensions, e.g., to correct an under- or overbid. The procedure is performed via an intraoral approach and includes the creation of an osteotomy line in the mandible using a saw or a burr, followed by a controlled splitting of the bone by a reversed twisting of one or two chisels inserted into the line. more

The general idea of brain simulation is to reverse engineer the brain using large-scale simulations.

To understand the relationships between structure and dynamics on multiple scales, ranging from microscopic circuits to networks at brain scale, forms a formidable challenge in neuroscience and produces a large amount of data. This data has to be analyzed in a timely fashion to understand the simulated model and extract insight about its functioning at the aforementioned scales. more