Two computer scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have won awards for their virtual reality research
Two computer scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have won awards for their virtual reality research.
The awards were given by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society, the world’s leading organization of computing professionals.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr., Kenan Professor of Computer Science in the College of Arts and Sciences, received the 2010 Virtual Reality Career Award. The award honors his lifetime contributions to virtual reality research and practice.
Ming C. Lin, Beverly W. Long Distinguished Term Professor of Computer Sciences, also in the college, received the 2010 Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award. The award recognizes seminal technical achievements in virtual and augmented reality.
For more than 30 years, Brooks – who founded the computer science department in 1964 – has led a laboratory that fosters scientific and technical advances in virtual reality, providing solutions to real user problems, such as helping biochemists study complex molecules and letting architects virtually walk through buildings that are still on the drawing board.
Lin has been working on physics-based interaction and geometric modeling for virtual reality, computer graphics, haptics, sound rendering and robotics for more than 20 years. Her research group is enhancing the realism of virtual cityscapes by incorporating interactive, large-scale crowd and traffic simulation.
Web sites: http://www.cs.unc.edu/
http://www.computer.org
Photos:
Brooks: http://bit.ly/cUINip
Lin: http://bit.ly/bnpKza
Computer science contact: Kelli Gaskill, (919) 962-1790, gaskill@cs.unc.edu
College of Arts and Sciences contact: Kim Spurr, (919) 962-4093, spurrk@email.unc.edu