UMIACS Summer Interns Get Hands-On Experience with Virtual Reality

From making gaming more immersive to helping surgeons determine the best way to remove a tumor, virtual reality (VR) is rapidly becoming the next big thing in education and entertainment.

During a recent summer internship at UMIACS, three regional high school students interested in computer science got some hands-on experience with VR. They also learned about innovative visualization research underway at the University of Maryland.

The students worked with Unity 3D, a cross-platform game engine used to develop video games, and also spent time in the Augmentarium, an interactive lab that brings together UMIACS faculty, graduate students and others to explore ideas and technologies that combine real-time data within virtual settings and backdrops.

“We appreciated having the students here over the summer,” says Amitabh Varshney, a professor of computer science and director of UMIACS. “Their new ideas and enthusiasm for advancing virtual reality benefitted the work we are doing.”

Avik Singh, a senior at Langley High School who is planning to major in computer science or electrical engineering, says interning at UMIACS helped him learn more about programming.

“It was a wonderful work experience,” he says. “Unity is the new upcoming programming language and the next generation programming in 3-D and since my passion lies in games programming, I was extremely excited to learn this new language.”

Ben Auslin, a junior at Montgomery Blair High School, says he spent his internship doing computer graphics-related research, and worked on rendering point clouds in real-time.

“I've gained insight into what ‘graphics’ means to a computer, and how numbers are manipulated to create the artifacts that people see on screen,” Auslin says.

He notes he initially used OpenGL as the graphics library to visualize the vast number of points that were stored in a file and found working with Unity to be helpful.

“For the internship, I learned how to use the Unity game engine, which I think will make things such as handling input and adding artificial entities into the scene easier on my part,” Auslin says.

Julian Daley (shown in photo), a senior at Eleanor Roosevelt High School, says he would like to pursue a career in programming. During his internship, he focused on ways to remedy the motion sickness—known as cybersickness—that can occur while using VR.

“I really enjoyed learning about and working with Unity 3D,” he says. “I also saw a demo of some VR equipment in the Augmentarium, where I learned more about the work done in the field of virtual reality at Maryland—it was really impressive stuff.”

—Story by Melissa Brachfeld