Researching the center of Europe

After the amazing training week in Juelich Supercomputing Centre where we had a brief introduction to OpenMP, MPI, ParaView, CUDA and some Team Building, it was time to start with the real business. I got into a plane headed to the heart of Europe: Czech Republic. When I arrived, my mentor came to pick me up and start this summer journey.

He showed me around. In the area there are many companies related to IT and facilities that belong to the university. I’m staying this summer in the university dormitories, just 2 minutes away by foot from the IT4I building.

The coolest building

Czech graduation tradition in the dorms

The weather wanted to stop the fun, but they were ready for it. Colours of Ostrava was the same week I arrived, and we had tickets thanks to IT4Innovations! We had our own booth where people would come to satisfy their curiosity about technology. There was some games to test people’s skills, and also one Leap device where the player had to pick up boxes in a precise way. In the spare time we were free to go to any concert, but we could listen to them loud enough from the booth anyways.

Cool guys don’t look at explosions

A wild human discovering Virtual Reality

After that, it was time to get back to work. Many hours of reading tutorials and the use of trial and error methodology were in any daily schedule. It was like being a snail, advancing slowly but surely. The main focus was to learn all I could about Unity and make a comfortable work environment.

A basic test level was made. It consisted in a demo scene with a 3D model which fills the role of an “organ” in a real level.  Some functionalities were programmed at this moment as well, like making the game able to sense the mouse movement and rotate the camera or some basic controller for the player, so it could fly around the level and have the feeling it’s driving a plane. In the end, we’re going to use Spline interpolation for a predefined route in every level, but it helped me to get into the basic level of the C# API for Unity. The introduction work was done, now we will get into the real deal: medical data and actually making a game.

In the spare days, it was mandatory to explore the surroundings.

Lucky me for the second time, there was a motorbike race in a village near Ostrava called Radvanice, where they adapted the streets into an urban circuit. It was slightly bigger than just a local tournament, since there were drivers from the countries near Czech Republic.

VROOM VROOM

Despite Ostrava being famous for its excessive industries and not having that much historical places, it still has some good views and feels very cozy.

The view from the top of Nová Radnice

In the following weeks there’s more trips planned and more work to come, mainly in Blender. But for now, that’s all folks