Bart Kevelham

I’m halfway through my second working week at MIRALab. And things are slowly starting to calm down. Sure, I have a lot of work to do, but that’s not bad at all. What I mean is that more and more of the annoying tasks get finished. With a little bit of luck I will know by tomorrow if I have an apartment or not. If I do, I can move in this Sunday. Everything around my bank-account is almost set up and ready to use. I’ve paid the money for a French course at Migros. (That will start on October 25th). And I’ve seen almost all my friends again. Besides that I’ve met a couple of new interesting people and I might meet even more. That’s always great, because Geneve can be a pretty lonely city.

Work is going fine. As part of the Epoch project we are planning to release parts of our VR/AR engine VHD++ as open source. As a side-task to this, I am integrating a scenegraph based rendering system called OpenSG into the system via a plug-in. Usually we use OpenSceneGraph (OSG), but we want to show how easy it is to switch to your own renderer of choice. And I have to say, it’s not such a big task at all. So I should be able to finish that quite soon.

And besides that there are another couple of projects that I might get involved in soon, but I will tell more about it when I’m sure. So you will just have to keep waiting.

Hi everybody,

it has been a bit silent on my site lately, but that’s because I have been busy organizing everything over here in Geneve. If all is well my permit should arrive in three weeks. I have opened a bank account, signed all the forms for the university and visited a number of appartments. Unfortunately I haven’t had any luck yet when it comes to finding a place to stay. There have been a couple of options, but either they are poorly located (as in, too far away from Geneve) or I’m not selected out of the list with all the viewers. I have until the end of this month to find something. If I don’t get anything within the next two weeks I guess I will beg the Cite Universitaire for another room.

So if any of you out there who read this blog think “hey, but I have an opportunity for him in Geneve”, please let me know. Most of you will probably know how difficult it is to get something over here. But appart from the housing issue things are going fine over here. First I had a week of relative relaxation. A nice opportunity to see my friends again. I missed them all a lot those months that I was finishing my thesis. So it was great to see them again. This week I’ve started my job. The first two days were pretty relaxed. There was a conference (CUSO2006) that all research assisstants had to attend. This year it was on the virtual simulation of touch. Of course not all of the talks were interesting to me, since this is not my area of expertise, but there were quite a few interesting speakers like dr. Miguel A. Otaduy of the ETHZ in Zurich. And of course prof. HyungSeok Kim. The former “dr. Kim” of MIRALab. It was great to see him again. Such a nice guy, even though he tends to torture me.

Today I’ve spent most of the day setting up my workstation. Dowloading libraries, compiling them, solving strange issues. Any developer out there knows the drill. It takes so much of your time during the day and can be so boring. But at least I know now that tomorrow I can finally get to work. There are a couple of interesting projects buzzing around that I might get involved in. I can’t tell you too much about it yet, since nothing has been confirmed, but as soon as I know what I will exactly be doing I’ll let you know.

I hope that within the next couple of days/weeks things will settle down a bit over here. Not that I think I’ve been working hard, but I would like all the side-things to be over so I can focus on my work and relax a bit in the weekend by spending time painting or drawing. Speaking about that, you might want to check out my “art” blog at art.kevelham.com. There I will show most of the things I sketch, draw and paint. I will keep this blog mostly to keep you up to date on my work at MIRALab.

Well, this got a bit longer than intended, but at least now you know what I’ve been doing. If you haven’t fallen asleep just yet you might want to check this place out again soon when there are some fresh updates.