Team members, Jonathan Lee and Ross Graham, set the mitered edges of the planters during the construction of the solar house in Washington D.C.

Earning 732.152 points out of 1,000 put the University of Kentucky in ninth place overall in the competition. The contest is a project of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in partnership with DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The Solar Decathlon consists of 10 contests that center on all of the ways in which we use energy in our daily lives. A media intern from the the Vis Center’s Media Experience for Undergrads was presented with the team in Washington D.C. for the full three week experience. While our full documentary is currently in post-production, on-site videos are available on the s.ky blue website.

The Kentucky solar house was also featured recently on the Today Show.

Four panelist debate during evening session

On Thursday, November 5, the Vis Center hosted a full day Forum on Coal in Kentucky. Featuring nearly 20 speakers ranging from coal producers, environmentalists, regulators and researchers. Over 300 people attended the daytime sessions and another 300 attendees came out for the evening session. Read more about it.

University of Kentucky President Lee T. Todd Jr. and lead donor Davis Marksbury today presided over groundbreaking ceremonies for a new $18.6 million building to house the second phase of the university’s high-tech “Digital Village” concept. The building will be named for Marksbury, a 1980 civil engineering alumnus and a leading donor in a project primarily supported through private donations.

Todd and Marksbury were joined by Secretary of the Governor’s Executive Cabinet Mary Lassiter, Lexington Mayor Jim Newberry and UK College of Engineering Dean Thomas Lester, in a ceremony at the building site on Rose Street near the UK James F. Hardymon Building, which is also part of the Digital Village.

“This is a historic moment for the University of Kentucky,” said Todd. “Not only will the Davis Marksbury Building provide UK with world-class research and teaching space, it is the first capital construction project to be constructed solely with private support and matching funds from the state’s Research Challenge Trust Fund.”

Read the rest of the story from the University of Kentucky

Construction begins on the mall in Washington D.C.

The University of Kentucky is one of twenty universities worldwide invited to participate in Solar Decathlon sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. Faculty and students from UK are now assembling their solar house on the Mall in Washington, D.C. The entire trip is being documented by a Vis Center Media for Research intern who is traveling with the group which is comprised of faculty, staff and students from the Colleges of Agriculture, Design and Engineering. Don Colliver, Professor of Biosystems and Agriculture Engineering, has been the principal investigator on the project with assistance from a number of engineering faculty and staff. Dozens of corporations and individuals provided contributions including a lead gift of $250,000 provided by E.ON U.S.

Once the competition is completed, the house will be transported back to the Kentucky Horse Park, where it will serve as the visitor’s center for the City of Lexington at the 2010 World Equestrian Games. Eventually, the house will probably be located on the UK campus where it will continue to serve as a research facility and other as yet undetermined purposes.

Rending of the solar house completed.

The Vis Center Media Department will complete a half hour documentary which will chronicle the development and construction of the solar house in addition to videos being posted during the three week event.

Click here to watch videos following the team in Washington D.C. as they build the solar house.

3D model of water

In recent years, modeling complex real world objects and scenes using cameras has been an active research topic in both graphics and vision. Work has been done creating 3D models of flowers, trees, hairs, urban building, human motion and cloth. However, there has previously not been a successful reconstruction of water from video. Water’s complex shape causes even the best matching methods to yield poor depth maps. Its dynamic nature and complex topological changes over time make human refinement too tedious for most applications.

Camera set up for 3D liquid modeling

Project members Huamin Wang, Miao Liao, Qing Zhang, Ruigang Yang, and Greg Turk in partnership with the Georgia Institute of Technology have created an image-based reconstruction framework to model real water scenes captured by stereoscopic video. The goal of the project is to efficiently reconstruct realistic 3D fluid animations with physical soundness. Experiments have shown that the system can create results that faithfully inherit the nuances and details of fluids from regular video input. Potentially this system will allow artists to design and modify a coarse initial shape in order to create stylized animations. The method may have applications in feature-film special effects and in video game content creation.

You can now download a free iPhone application that keeps you connected to research, updates and news wherever you are. The application includes recent research projects including descriptions and photos as well as links for videos, updates from our blog and other news.

Click here to go to the app

In Paris, conservators carefully oversee the scrolls to ensure they are not damaged in the scanning process.

LEXINGTON, KY (wuky) – Anyone who’s taken a Western Civilization class is certainly familiar with the sudden and cataclysmic destruction of the Ancient Roman Cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Now, thanks to some cutting edge technology being employed by researchers at the University of Kentucky, future students may one day find themselves poring over new chapters in their history textbooks. Jennifer Parker reports.

Listen to the story.

The Vis Center team working on digitally unrolling Herculaneum scrolls through the EDUCE project was recently highlighted in an article in the Lexington Herald-Leader. Check out the story.

Audio recording is a typical part of covert surveillance. However, the standard technologies used such as fixed microphone arrays, shotgun microphones and parabolic microphones are useful for picking up speech from distant speakers, but limited in their use by size and position constraints. A better understanding of microphone arrays with complex geometries could enable agents to place microphones at arbitrary positions in an environment such as a restaurant under tables, on lights, chairs, or on the clothing of agents in the room just minutes before the person under surveillance enters the room.

Vis Center faculty member, Kevin Donohue, has developed a project sponsored by the Federal Bureau of Investigation focusing on developing technology that combines wireless microphones mounted statically around an area or on moving platforms with clusters of computers to provide near-real time processing for tracking the suspect’s speech and delivering intelligible speech. The goal is to provide criminal justice and law enforcement agencies with the enhanced ability to covertly record and listen to remote conversation of suspect individuals in areas where multiple conversations are ongoing.

Researchers at the Vis Center recently published a paper demonstrating the system they have developed for LUT-based processing for real-time phase generation and 3-D reconstruction by means of structured light illumination. University of Kentucky student Kai Liu, along with fellow students, Yongchang Wang and Qi Hao as well as faculty members Daniel L. Lau and Laurence G. Hassebrook announced they have been able to use structured light illumination to produce real-time acquisition and creation of 3-D models.

Structured light illumination (SLI) is the process of projecting a series of light striped patterns onto an object. A digital camera then records the deformation in the pattern to reconstruct a 3-D model of the object’s surface. Using only a single camera and illumination source with a single processing computer, the system can easily be constructed from readily available parts.

In the past, SLI has not typically been used with video applications because of the very high frame rate needed. Based on the complexity of the calculations, video-based SLI systems have been required to record camera frames to memory and then apply off-line processing in order to reconstruct 3-D video.

This project has devised a lookup-table based solution that can generate real-time acquisition and display of 3-D scans. The system can acquire and display 3-D video in real-time. The potential uses for this technology include facial recognition applications, biometrics, and hand gesture recognition.