Tag Archives: glasses

MU Unveils 3-D Visual Immersion Laboratory

*New “iLab” will allow undergraduate students to design projects in a 3-D environment*

COLUMBIA, Mo. – One of the most difficult tasks architects and interior designers face when designing buildings and rooms is visualizing exactly what their projects will look like when they are finished. Now, the University of Missouri architectural studies department has developed the Immersive Visualization Lab (iLab) to help students visualize their designs more accurately. Bimal Balakrishnan, an assistant professor of architectural studies in MU College of Human Environmental Sciences, says the iLab will be one of few labs in the country to allow undergraduate students to get hands-on experience using immersive 3-D technology to complete and test their designs as part of their design studio curriculum.

“Most university immersion labs are reserved primarily for graduate students to use for research purposes,” Balakrishnan said. “While the MU iLab will be used for research, it will also serve as an excellent teaching and experiential tool for undergraduate students.” (more…)

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Searching for the “Perfect Glass”

Washington, D.C.— Glasses differ from crystals. Crystals are organized in repeating patterns that extend in every direction. Glasses lack this strict organization, but do sometimes demonstrate order among neighboring atoms. New research from Carnegie’s Geophysical Laboratory reveals the possibility of creating a metallic glass that is organized on a larger scale. Their results are published June 17 in Science.

Scientists have discovered glasses that demonstrate order among the nearest neighboring atoms, called short-range order, and a slightly wider range of atoms, called medium-range order. Most research about finding or creating a glass with a long-range, nearly crystalline, level of order—referred to as the perfect glass state—has been conducted on ice and the minerals silica and zeolite. But no research into long-range order glass has been successful until now. (more…)

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