Multimedia Lab /iMinds

Current research aims at investigating, developing, and assessing new ways of experiencing media and interacting with it. This image shows a researcher working with virtual reality glasses. In the near future we want to be able to use these VR glasses in a 360° live video context. This would, for example, enable people to watch a live soccer game in their sofa while being able to look around as if they were in the stadium.

This is a picture of Curry & Thomson; both are portable Big Data clusters - sold by the Belgian startup BigBoards - small enough to be put on your desk. Each cluster consists of 6 nodes having a NUC 2-core i3 CPU, 16GB RAM and a 1 TB spinning disk (6 times). Curry & Thomson will be used to allow students to run their labs in a real Big Data environment and experiment with Apache Spark and related technologies. The clusters are also used to support research on (distributed) query technologies for the Semantic Web, which is, up until now, mostly restricted to single endpoint solutions.

This high-end workstation is capable of processing 2500 MB/s using SAS3 technology to 64 GB of physical memory or 12 GB of combined GPU memory (SLI), which is required for processing (extremely) large amounts of (3D) data and accelerating parallel processing on 4 TITAN X GPU’s. It will be used for experiments with virtualization,  3D mesh compression, simulation, and procedural generation of virtual environments. Applications include virtual reality, augmented reality, and 3D gaming.