Immersive Visualization Competition

The IVF, in conjunction with the Institute for Scientific Computation, is pleased to announce its fourth annual Scientific Visualization Competition for Texas A&M University students. Through this competition, students will gain hands-on experience with the IVF's advanced visualization technology and will demonstrate their proficiency with visualization techniques and software.

Scientific visualization is the graphical representation of scientific data to gain insight and understanding of the data. For example, meteorologists use images of radar data to visually understand the path of a thunderstorm. Chemists create 3D models of molecular structures to visualize bonds and bond angles. Artistic visualizations may be even more open-ended. In fact, the possibilities are endless - with a little creativity, any research area can benefit from visual images. For this reason, the IVF is opening this competition to any Texas A&M student (graduate students and undergraduates alike) in any department and any major.

For this competition, students will create a visualization using data of their choosing and will be judged based on visual appeal, scientific accuracy or artistic merit (as applicable), and verbal presentation. Students must submit a proposal explaining what they plan to visualize. The students with the best proposals will be selected to implement their proposals and present their final results for judging. The two best projects will receive an NVIDIA GTX 285.

Important Dates

• Friday, October 23, 2009 5:00 p.m. - Deadline for proposals
• Friday, November 6, 2009 2:00 p.m. - Final presentations and judging

Proposal Details

Participants are required to submit a brief proposal (1 page or less, pictures welcome) explaining what dataset or concept they wish to explore and summarize the visualization they plan to create. To encourage creativity and participation from multiple disciplines, no restrictions will be placed on the dataset or concept to be visualized. Participants can create their own dataset, utilize a public dataset, or obtain a dataset from Texas A&M researchers or a corporate sponsor, or create something of an artistic, interpretive nature Proposals must be submitted via e-mail to

staff //AT// ivc.tamu.edu

by 5:00pm, Friday, October 23, 2009. Students will be notified of their selection and will be granted a computer account on the IVF systems to begin work on their visualization. Participants will present their final results in the IVF for judging on Friday, November 6, 2009. We strongly urge you to begin work on your project as early as possible.

Requirements

To qualify, participants must be a full-time student enrolled at Texas A&M University during the Fall 2009 semester. All majors are encouraged to participate. Both individuals and teams may compete. Only one proposal may be submitted per person/team.

Participants may develop their visualizations on any system, but the final results must be compatible with the hardware and software available in the IVF. Participants are responsible for ensuring that their results will perform as expected in the IVF. They may request that additional software be installed by IVF staff, but such requests are not guaranteed to be accepted.

Judging and Awards

On the day of the competition, each student will present a five to ten minute demonstration of his or her results. Entries will be judged based on

• Visual Appeal
• Scientific Appeal / Artistic Merit (as applicable)
• Verbal Presentation

Last year's competition results are available here.