Laboratory for Interactive Virtual Environments

Our lab pursues research in physics-based simulation of natural phenomena within a virtual environment, exploring applications in computer graphics, scientific computing, computational biomechanics, and robotics. We design numerical discretizations for capturing new effects, and also emphasize the design of efficient data structures and numerical solvers to allow highly detailed simulations to benefit from the hardware available on modern compute platforms, with the ultimate goal of achieving real-time (or interactive) simulation rates.

Research Overview

The following video provides a broad overview of our lab's recent research:

Lab Members

Prof. Mridul Aanjaneya

Lab Director
Associate Professor
Computer Science

Chengguizi Han

PhD Student
Computer Science

Alon Flor

PhD Student
Computer Science

Nelson Chen

PhD Student
(co-advised with Prof. Kostas Bekris)
Computer Science

Alumni

	Dr. Tao Xue Postdoctoral Researcher Now faculty at Nanjing University of Science and Technology		Dr. Kun Wang PhD Student (co-advised with Prof. Kostas Bekris) Now at Amazon Robotics		Aditi Patil MS Student Now at Apple
	Dr. Haozhe Su PhD Student Now at Tencent America		Dr. Ioannis Polykretis PhD Student (co-advised with Prof. Konstantinos Michmizos) Now at Accenture Research Labs

Software

Our lab maintains an open-source codebase called Nova, with the aim of creating a library that is light-weight and flexible, while at the same time customizable for high-performance implementations. Its design allows for custom visualization plugins that are specific to each project, and example projects that utilize the library are kept under a separate repository called Nova_Examples.