Amitabh Varshney
Virtual and Augmented Environments: The Hype and the Hope

Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Building 3 Auditorium - 11:00 AM
(Coffee and cookies at 10:30 AM)

We are on the cusp of an explosive growth in technology and applications for visualizing and augmenting the world around us for knowledge discovery, education, and entertainment driven by three significant trends: (i) advances in displays, including wearable head-mounted displays and projectors, (ii) novel interaction devices that leverage recent advances in gyroscopes, accelerometers, and infrared sensors such as Kinect, and (iii) user-programmable many-core graphics hardware. Virtual Reality (VR) experience is one in which a user is immersed in a computer-generated responsive world. Augmented reality (AR) facilitates enhancement of a real-world scene by superimposing a computer-generated image in a viewer's field of view. In this talk, I shall outline some of the challenges we currently face in enabling virtual and augmented reality for real-world applications as well as some promises that such environments hold for the future.

Amitabh Varshney is the Director of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland at College Park. Varshney's research focus is on exploring the applications of graphics and visualization in engineering, science, and medicine. He has worked on a number of research areas in graphics and visualization including visual saliency, summarization of large visual datasets, automatically generating multiresolution hierarchies, procedural textures, and rendering with points, images, meshes, and volumes. He is currently exploring general-purpose high-performance parallel computing using clusters of CPUs and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). He has served in various roles in the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee, including as its Chair 2008 - 2012. He received the IEEE Visualization Technical Achievement Award in 2004. He is a Fellow of IEEE.

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Jacqueline LeMoigne

Sign language interpreter upon request: 301-286-7040