VRVis

VRVis Zentrum für Virtual Reality und Visualisierung Forschungs-GmbH
Logo of the VRVis Research Center for Virtual Reality and Visualization
Type	Nonprofit organization
Founded	2000
Founder	Vienna University of Technology
Headquarters	Vienna, Austria
Key people	Georg Stonawski (CEO), Werner Purgathofer (scientific director)
Services	Applied Research, Development and Consulting in Visual Computing (Computer Science)
Revenue	ca. 5,1 million € (2013)^[1]
Website	www.vrvis.at

The VRVis Zentrum für Virtual Reality und Visualisierung (VRVis) is the largest independent research center in the area of Visual Computing in Austria, and one of the largest in Europe. It is one of 21 centrally funded COMET – Competence Centers for Excellent Technologies of Austria.^[2] The VRVis Center ^[3] is located in Tech Gate Vienna in Vienna.

History

The VRVis Center for Virtual Reality and Visualization was founded in January 2000 funded by the Austrian Kplus Competence Center program. The main initiator was Werner Purgathofer from TU Wien, with 3 other Austrian institutes as co-investigators. In 2010 VRVis received a new funding from the Austrian COMET program.

VRVis is located in the science and technology park Tech Gate Vienna since 2001.

Organization and Business

VRVis functions as a cooperation between scientific and industry partners, partly funded by the Austrian and Viennese governments. It is organized as a non-profit limited company owned by an association that has the only purpose to administrate VRVis. The members of this association are currently (January 2015):^[1]

TU Wien: 26% of the votes
Graz University of Technology: 14% of the votes
University of Vienna: 10% of the votes
23 partner companies: together 50% of the votes.

The main business of VRVis is strategic and application oriented research in Visual Computing, with an emphasis on transferring state-of-the-art scientific results to companies in all areas. This includes projects financed by other funding sources, such as European projects and the Austrian Science Foundation. More than 50 FTE researchers from various fields cooperate with scientific and industrial partners to produce software and system solutions. Around 500 scientific publications have been published and 20 best paper awards have been achieved so far.

The scientific cooperation network of VRVis is quite large, including ETH Zurich (CH), University of Bergen (N), Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg (D), University of Rostock (D), KAUST (Saudi Arabia), University Medical Center Freiburg (D), Institute Claudio Regaud (F), Fondazione Santa Lucia (I), Delft University of Technology (NL), St Thomas' Hospital (UK), Virginia Tech (USA), Arizona State University (USA), City University London (UK), European Space Agency ESA, Fraunhofer IGD (D), Stanford University (USA), University of Konstanz (D) and many more.

Industry Partners include Agfa Healthcare (B/A), AVL List, Geodata, Austrian Federal Railways Infrastruktur AG, Kapsch TrafficCom AG, IMP - Research Institute of Molecular Pathology, and many more.

Competence Areas

The VRVis Center does research and technology transfer in the following four areas:

Visualization

Visual Analytics

Data Mining
Simulation Visualization
Software Development

Rendering

Light Simulation
Modeling
Virtual Reality

Computer Vision

Segmenting of 3D Data
Reconstruction

Awards and Prizes

e-Award 2014: Category Industry and Commerce, 2nd prize for the project "Enervis", March 2014
e-Award 2014, Category T-Systems Innovation Award, 2nd prize for the project "Enervis", March 2014
ZIT CALL: IKT Vienna 2013, 1st prize for the project "SLOT Management Support Tools", September 2013
Science2business award 2012, 1st prize for the project “Visual Computing for Computer Aided Diagnostic and Operation Planning”, March 2012
e-Award 2011 Lower Austria, 1st prize for the project "Virtual Reality Biofeedback Training", January 2012
Mercur Federal Prize for Multimedia and e-Business, Jury Prize for the project "Tactile Paintings", 2011
Innovation Prize of Lower Austria – Category Organization and Marketing Innovation, 1st prize for the project "Virtual Design Process", 2009
Innovation Prize of Lower Austria – Category Organization and Marketing Innovation, 2nd prize for the project "Virtual Fire Extinguisher", 2009
Long Science Night 2008: 1st prize for "excellent science communication", November 2008
ZIT CALL: CO Operate enlarged, Vienna 2005, 2nd prize for the project "Control Station Supplements", 2005

External links

Website (vrvis.at)

References

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Saturday, February 20, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.