HIVE Part 2

Today was a bit of an eye opener. The HIVE is barely operational while we are waiting for 2 Matrox TripleHead2Go boxes to come in. We had workies in 3 days ago installing small scaffolding and the Vertalis guys in putting a new constellation of trackers on the ceiling to increase the range of motion on the headtracker, gloves, wand etc.

Regardless, PhD students have to get up and on with things and there was another RDC induction at Dudhope castle that we were to attend. I had teaching until 11 this morning so I had to go in a bit late to listen to some of my fellow PhD students present their work to their peers.

Of course, 15 minutes in the place and I was informed that I needed to give out my password for the HIVE....hmm, I think not. There had been a last minute scramble to get the Chief of Police for Tayside and some STV cameras in for a photo op and, of course, they wanted the HIVE.

I am loving the extra responsibility of helping restore the HIVE and hopefully taking its capabilities to a new level but I seriously under-estimated the work involved and the drop-it-like-its-hot attitude I have had to take with other tasks in order to fulfil these tour commitments.

Chris

HIVE

Anyone familiar with Abertay University will know (or should know) about the HIVE. It stands for Haptic (Human) Interactive Virtual Environment and consists of two rather large screens with 4 rear projectors to allow us (students and staff) to view content in stereo.

I have taken it upon myself (honestly...lack of volunteers) to help rebuild the computer that runs the HIVE in my limited and precious free time.

In case you are interested, the guts of the computer can be found below

Motherboard: ASUS P6T7 WS SuperComputer
CPU: Intel i7 Extreme Edition
RAM: 12GB corsair DDR3
Graphics cards: 2 x EVGA 295 GTX (quad SLI) and one EVGA 8800GTX for CUDA computing and physx processing
Hard Drives: 2 x 1.2 Terrabyte Western Digital 7200rpm drives. 1 x 320GB Seagate barracuda

I look forward to posting some benchmark scores from 3DMark06, 3DMarkVantage and SisSandra, keep your eyes peeled.

Chris

My First Paper

While there have been many "firsts" during my short time as a PhD student, the most gratifying (so far at least) has to be the completion and submission of my first paper. For those of you unfamiliar with research papers, it's basically a scientific record of my progress which is submitted to conferences, publications etc in the hope of others being interested and, perhaps more importantly, let the computer visualisation community know what I am doing and how I am doing it.

The paper was submitted two weeks ago for a conference in Innsbruck, Austria. I wont hear back with a yes/no for about a month or so but here's hoping!

I found the hardest thing, for me, when writing this paper (or anything related to a PhD -> bi-annual reports, literature reviews and so on) is that I found myself having to convince my own being that I was good enough to write about my research. For so long I have been stuck in the "It's my first year" mindset which I have concluded only hinders my progress. I am in the 2nd year of my research now, there isn't long to go and software systems, simulations and pretty graphics don't magically appear.

I have had two major crisis of confidence so far but no more! I have to find the self-belief that I am not only capable of getting the PhD but that I was in fact the right candidate to be picked for such a project.

Introduction

The purpose of this blog is to fill the requirements set by Abertay University's Research Degree's Committee for the successful completion of a PhD. The research, the thesis and the 4 hour viva needs to be accompanied with a PDP or Personal Development Plan. This blog starts one year into my PhD and will be a record of personal development throughout my PhD.

Chris