VRVis
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File:VRVis-Logo.jpg
Logo of the VRVis Research Center for Virtual Reality and Visualization
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| Nonprofit organization | |
| Founded | 2000 |
| Founder | Vienna University of Technology |
| Headquarters | Vienna, Austria |
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Key people
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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.
Contents
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:
- Scientific Visualization
- Medical visualization
- Scalable Solutions
- Data Mining
- Simulation Visualization
- Software Development
- Light Simulation
- Modeling
- Virtual Reality
- 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
