VRVis

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 currently 22 centrally funded COMET – Competence Centers for Excellent Technologies of Austria.
COMET - Competence Centres for Excellent Technologies, ERAWATCH/European Commission, erawatch.jrc.ec.europa.eu
' The VRVis Center VRVis Factsheet COMET K1
/ref> is located in Ares Tower in Vienna.

History

The VRVis Center for Virtual Reality and Visualization was founded in January 2000, and funded by the Austrian Kplus Competence Center program. The main initiator of the organization was Werner Purgathofer from TU Wien, with 3 other Austrian institutes as co-investigators. In 2010 and 2017 VRVis received new funding from the Austrian COMET program.

VRVis was located in the science and technology park Tech Gate Vienna since 2001, in 2017 it moved to Ares Tower in Vienna.

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 (2017):
VRVis Geschäftsbericht 2016/17
'
* TU Wien: 26% of the votes
* Graz University of Technology: 10% of the votes
* University of Vienna: 8% of the votes
* Austrian Institute of Technology: 1% of the votes
* Joanneum Research: 1% of the votes
* Medical University of Vienna: 1% of the votes
* Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg: 1% of the votes
* Universität Stuttgart: 1% of the votes
* University of Utah: 1% of the votes

* approx. 30 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), 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), Imperial College London (UK), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA), Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz DFKI (D), Institute of Science and Technology Austria (A), The Open University (UK), Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (NL) and many more.

Industry Partners include Agfa Healthcare (B/A), AVL List, Geodata, Austrian Federal Railways Infrastruktur AG, IMP - Research Institute of Molecular Pathology, Zumtobel Lighting, Austrian Power Grid, Hilti, Stadtentwässerungsbetriebe Köln, RHI Magnesita, GE Healthcare and many more.

Competence areas

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

''Visualization''
* Scientific visualization
* Medical visualization
* Scalable solutions

'' Visual analytics''
* Data mining
* Simulation visualization
* Software development

'' Rendering''
* Light simulation
* Modeling
* Virtual reality

''Computer vision''
* Segmenting of 3D data
* Reconstruction

References

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Laboratories in Austria
Research institutes in Austria
Engineering organizations
TU Wien