News

We had a great time at the GI VR workshop! Tim Härtel shared his paper “Gamified VR-Training for Human Middle and Inner Ear Anatomical Structures”, and Janine Zöllner presented her poster “Learning Physics through Elastic Storytelling in Virtual Reality: A Museum-Like Educational Experience.”

The GI VR/AR group fosters research, knowledge exchange, and collaboration in virtual and augmented reality through its long-standing annual workshop that unites academia and industry.

This year’s workshop was a fun and inspiring exchange with colleagues from the VR community, sparking lots of new ideas and fresh perspectives.

Our contribution „Visual Disease Stories: Empowering Health Literacy and Promotion“ with Sarah Mittenentzwei as first author received the first price in the bi-annual competition for the Dirk Bartz Price of the Eurographics. The price was awarded on the EuroVis, June 2025. Further contributors are Sophie Mlitzke, Beatrice Budich, Anna Kleinau, Monique Meuschke and Bernhard Preim. The price acknowledges several contributions on narrative medical visualization informing in an engaging manner about diseases, their prevention, early detection, diagnosis and treatment.

We had Torsten Möller, University of Vienna as a guest in our group. He gave an interesting and well-received talk on “Vis4All: Visual encodings for a broad audience”. Laura Garrison, Associate professor at the University of Bergen, joins us for a research stay to discuss further projects on narrative medical visualization.

Aaron Schroeder received the Rudolf-Kruse prize for his paper “Advanced visualization of aortic dissection anatomy and hemodynamics” that appeared in the journal “Computers & Graphics”. The paper is the result of a cooperation with the radiology department at Stanford University.

Welcome to Sophie Mlitzke and Aaron Schroeder. Sophie brings considerable experience in narrative visualization and Aaron is a specialist in medical flow visualization.

Benedikt Mayer successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “From Exploratory to Explanatory Interactive Visualization of Spatio-Temporal Conflict Data”. The thesis was reviewed by Prof. Dr. Holger Theisel (OvGU Magdeburg), Prof. Dr. Christian Tominski (Uni Rostock), and Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Aigner (FH St. Pölten). Benedikt worked primarily in the area of peace and conflict research, cooperating intensely with Prof. K. Donnay, Univ. of Zuerich. Benedikt considered the whole range between “exploration” and “explanation” of conflict data.

Mareen Allgaier successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled “Applying Surgeon-centric Design to Advanced VR-based Medical Training”. The thesis was reviewed by Prof. Dr. Christian Hansen (OvGU Magdeburg), Prof. Dr. Torsten Kuhlen (RWTH Aachen), and Prof. Dr. Thomas Wolbers (DZNE Magdeburg). In an entertaining ceremony, the candidate was celebrated at the Otto-von-Guericke monument.

VisGroup will be giving four presentations at this year’s VCBM 2024, which takes place on 19th and 20th September in Magdeburg.

The VCBM 2024 program can be found here.

Aaron Schroeder defended his Master thesis on “Smoke-Like Visualization of Aortic Dissection Hemodynamics” with the best possible grade. Aaron adapted sophisticated flow visualization methods to display simulated flow in aortic dissections, clearly distinguishing flow in the true and false lumen as well as antegrade and retrograde flow. This work was accomplished in close cooperation with Dr. Gabriel Mistelbauer and his team from Stanford University.

Monique Meuschke was awarded with the EuroVis Early Career Award to recognize her significant contributions to medical flow visualization and narrative visualization. This prestigious award is given to only one young scientist (up to seven years after getting the PhD).