The Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) will host an open house for its new engagement center at Carolina on Thursday (Feb. 7), featuring state-of-the-art visualization technology and collaboration tools. The new center is located in the campus’ ITS Manning Building, 211 Manning Drive. The open house will run from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Pay parking is available in the Dogwood Lot on Manning Drive across from UNC Hospitals. Admission is free and refreshments will be available.
Faculty, staff, students and other visitors will have the chance to learn about RENCI research collaborations and will be able to tour three research environments that use cutting-edge visualization and collaboration technologies. Those environments are:
• The Showcase Room, with a 15-foot tilted multiprojector dome display for interacting with data in an immersive 180-degree field of view.
• The Social Computing Room, which uses 12 projectors to create a 360-degree display for virtual, immersive and interactive experiences.
• The Tele-immersion Room, with a 10-foot x 5-foot rear-projection screen for 3D stereoscopic viewing and long-distance collaboration at more than four times HD resolution.
The new center for RENCI, which is based at Carolina, will give faculty and staff on the Chapel Hill campus access to RENCI resources, staff, and collaborators and the opportunity to contribute to ongoing research projects of campus-wide, statewide and national scope. Members of the UNC community can also take the lead on new multidisciplinary research efforts that utilize RENCI’s visualization, computing and data resources.
RENCI was founded in 2004 as a major collaboration of Carolina, N.C. State and Duke universities and the state of North Carolina. RENCI’s anchor site is at 100 Europa Drive in Chapel Hill. Other engagement facilities are located in the Health Sciences Library on the Carolina campus, on N.C. State’s Centennial Campus and at East Carolina University in Greenville, UNC Charlotte and UNC-Asheville. An engagement center on the Duke campus is expected to open this spring.
For directions to the open house, please see http://www.renci.org/unc/about/location.php .