Seven teams of students from the capstone senior design project course displayed their work in the lobby of the Science & Engineering Building for the sixth consecutive year.

Right: The first place team of Sriyan Wisnarama (left), Shahroukh Sotodeh and Gowry Sinnathamby, with an unmanned remote controlled plane with their stabilization system

Prizes of $500, $300 and $200 were given to the first, second and third ranked team project, donated by . The project involves the design of complex engineering solutions to a real world problem.

Left: Second place winners, from left, Niken Goswami, Stephen Low, Chris Carmichael and Yan Ying Fang. Insert: Stephen Low showing the e-Glove to the judges.

The whole point of it is to come up with a marriage between the idea and the practical outcome, said one of the judges, Michael Sasarman (MBA ’05), director, strategic partnering and sourcing at Ericsson Inc.

“This is very good. It’s better than previous years,” said capstone project course instructor Professor George Zhu, director of the Space Engineering Undergraduate Program and the Space Engineering Design Laboratory. “There is more wireless technology on display this time.”

The project involves specifying the requirements of a suitable solution, selecting and designing a solution, implementing the design, and then testing, evaluating and documenting the chosen solution.

Right: From left, students Thaslim Ghani, Sowmiya Rajagopalan and Tamara Tanurdzic, with their smartphone remote controlled vehicle, which placed third in the competition

The group of students who took first place for their project had a remote controlled plane on display with an installed stabilization system. The Design and Implementation of a Stabilization System for a Remote Controlled Fixed-Wing Model (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) project would help prevent the plane from crashing out of control.

“Whatever orientation the plane has when the stabilization button is hit, it will return to level fight,” said student Gowry Sinnathamby. He was joined by his teammates Sriyan Wisnarama and Shahroukh Sotodeh.

In second place was the Sync Engineering Entertainment Glove with students Stephen Low, Yan Ying Fang, Niken Goswami and Chris Carmichael. The intent behind the e-Glove was to design a remotely controlled single system that is able to universally control functions across a range of electronic devices. That means there would be one device instead of several. The e-Glove would use universal infrared technology with finger gestures, rather than buttons, to control and switch between items such as televisions, stereo systems and clock radios.

Above: From left, Professor George Zhu and Sunil Chavda, director of corporate development for Com Dev International, pose with first-place winners Shahroukh Sotodeh, Sriyan Wisnarama and Gowry Sinnathamby, along with Professor Richard Hornsey, associate dean of science & engineering.

The project that won third – Smartphone Control of an Unmanned Robotic Vehicle – was designed by students Thaslim Ghani, Sowmiya Rajagopalan and Tamara Tanurdzic. The team took remote control technology to a smartphone. Phone rotation would control direction and speed depending on the angle or tilt of the phone, said Ghani. Through a GPS system, the vehicle could also be tracked. The students had mounted a laptop to the top of a small vehicle so the user can see either on their smartphone, or from another laptop, exactly what the camera on the mounted laptop is seeing.

Right: From left, Dan Reynolds, Calvin Midwinter, Patrick Irvin and Bay Ming Jian with the mock-up of their satellite

The practical advantages of this technology, says Ghani, is it can go where a human can’t, such as inside the damaged nuclear plant in Japan or perhaps Mars.

Some of the other projects included a mock-up of a microsatellite (QuickSat) body that is designed by the (CSA) and is licensed to 91ŃÇɫ for educational purposes. 91ŃÇÉ« is the first university in Canada to use it in the training of microsatellite technology where students not only design the satellite on paper, but also build a functional prototype. Students Dan Reynolds, Calvin Midwinter, Bay Ming Jian and Patrick Irvin worked on the design and fabrication of a solar panel assembly and its release mechanism under CSA's CAD model and technical specifications.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91ŃÇɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Vergados developed this technique to get more accurate readings of the Earth’s thermal structure.

It was designed for satellite-to-satellite GPS signals but works just as well in ground-to-satellite GPS used by the average driver.

Left: Panagiotis Vergados

Atmospheric scientists like Vergados estimate atmospheric parameters – pressure, density and temperature – by analyzing GPS signals received by low Earth-orbiting (LEO) satellites orbiting inside the Earth’s ionosphere.

As GPS signals enter the ionosphere – the Earth’s uppermost layer – on their way to the LEO satellite, the signals bend and accelerate. Scientists routinely correct for this effect when analyzing the signals for atmospheric parameters.

But they don’t bother correcting the second-order ionospheric effect – that of the Earth’s magnetic field on the GPS signal traversing the Earth's ionosphere. “It is a bit cumbersome to trace the signal and have knowledge both of the magnetic field and electron content at every point along its trajectory,” says Vergados.

No longer. The 28-year-old Vergados has found a simpler way to factor in this second-order ionospheric correction that results in more accurate atmospheric readings.

He applied the Faraday rotation phenomenon, a radio-astronomical technique used to calculate magnetic signals coming from galaxies, to resolving the second-order ionospheric correction in the GPS signals. “I said to myself, why not give it a try and maybe the Faraday would work better.” It did.

To make the Faraday technique work in retrieving more accurate atmospheric data from GPS signals, Vergados had to design three algorithms. He has presented each one in three separate and award-winning research papers, two of which have already been published in scientific journals.

“One would be good, but three is very good” for a doctoral student, says a proud Vergados, who hopes to graduate this coming academic year.

The first paper was "Bending angle retrieval algorithms using COSMIC mission observations". It won the national Best Student Paper Award in Geodesy at the Canadian Geophysical Union (CGU) conference in Banff, Alta., in 2008.

The second was “Studying the effect of GPS radio occultation bending angle variations on the retrieval process of dry atmospheric temperature profiles: A sensitivity analysis”. It won third place in the international Best Student Research Paper competition at the fourth in Boulder, Colorado in 2009. (COSMIC is a constellation of six micro-satellites orbiting the Earth at about 800 kilometres)

The third was titled “A new technique in retrieving Total Electron Content and second-order ionospheric delays in radio occultation experiments using GPS”. It won two awards –  – presented earlier this month in Ottawa at the 2010 (CMOS-CGU). The congress had over 1,000 registrants, and Vergados was competing against 10 to 15 students across Canada.

Judges must have been not only impressed with the groundbreaking content but with his easy-to-understand presentation, says Vergados.

Left: Panagiotis Vergados (right) accepts his 2010 CMOS-CGU prizes, with Spiros Pagiatakis, his PhD supervisor and CGU president

“The topic is completely new and I am one of the few students in Canada who works in this kind of research.”

Not bad for a PhD student in physics who grew up in Greece and only came to Canada seven years ago.

Vergados earned a bachelor of science in physics from the University of Ioannina in Greece in 2003. At a wine and cheese reception at the university, the Canadian ambassador approached him and his friends and suggested they attend a workshop on graduate studies in Canada. For a lark, he applied to 91ŃÇÉ«. Meanwhile, he found a graduate position in Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics and planned to go to school there – until 91ŃÇÉ« accepted him. Before he could say no, his Canadian-born mother had packed his bags and bought him a ticket to Toronto. He could speak English and had family here.

By 2006, Vergados had a master of science. For the past four years, under the supervision of Spiros Pagiatakis, a professor of geomatics engineering in 91ŃÇɫ’s , he has been working on his PhD. He expects to graduate next year and is already scouting around for a post-doc fellowship at national research centres and universities in Canada.

Vergados has no intention of returning to Greece. “I’m glad I came to 91ŃÇÉ«.”

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91ŃÇɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The Augmented Reality Lab in the Faculty of Fine Arts opens its doors to the 91ŃÇÉ« community March 10 for interactive demonstrations of augmented reality (AR) and GPS locative media research projects in development. From 11am to 3pm, visitors will have the opportunity to experience projections on FogScreen, immersive virtual environments and other innovative applications for AR technology.

Directed by film Professor Caitlin Fisher, Canada Research Chair in Digital Culture, 91ŃÇÉ«'s is at the forefront in working with both established and emerging technologies. As part of the , it is dedicated to producing innovative research methods, interfaces and content that challenge cinematic and literary conventions and aim to enhance how people interact with their physical environment and with each other.

Left: Caitlin Fisher

The lab offers artists and designers the opportunity to explore new screen technologies, approaches and techniques through production and theoretical study of this emerging medium. Lab participants work interactively and across disciplinary boundaries, particularly film and computer science.

A wide variety of projects will be on display at the open house.

Handheld City is an online streaming experience developed by the AR Lab for the city of Toronto’s virtual museum project, which launched March 6 (Toronto’s 176th birthday). Using AR as a storytelling device, the researchers organized and animated the digital objects in the museum collection and created an interesting way to interact with the objects and access the accompanying text.

Right: Handheld City was developed for Toronto's virtual museum project

The Amazing Cinemagician is an interactive "rfid" (radio frequency identification – like a barcode) video project for the FogScreen by Helen Papagiannis, a PhD student in communication & culture. Digitized film clips by cinematic special effects pioneer Georges Méliès are tied to a series of rfid objects that the viewer can scan to access the video.

Papagiannis made major waves in AR circles last fall with her presentation at the International Symposium for Mixed and Augmented Reality in Florida. A leading AR news blog, , dubbed her “the new ARtist in charge,” awarded her its Most Beautiful Demo award and put her on its top 10 list of forces currently shaping the industry.

CommCult master's student Justin Stephenson showcases a new "procedural animation" (a form of computer animation generated in real-time) using Quartz Composer.

Master of Fine Arts film student Simone Rapisarda presents the ladybike test project: the first film to come out of the lab using the Ladybug camera. This spherical digital video unit comprises multiple cameras and records more than 80 per cent of the full sphere. Rapisarda’s video, filmed with the camera set in a bicycle basket, shows the scenery approaching, speeding by and receding simultaneously.

Above: An image from Simone Rapisarda's ladybike test project

Also experimenting with the Ladybug camera is graduate film student Cameron Woykin, who has created a time-based video installation using footage of himself shot inside the lab. Edited into a spherical image, the video shows multiple views of the researcher as he moves around the space.

Right: The Ladybug camera in action

Wormholes is another experiment in spherical storytelling, created by Fisher and Andrew Roth, the lab’s technology manager. Using the lab’s Intersense IS900 Inertial/Sonic Tracking "virtual reality" grid, participants wearing a virtual reality headset can literally get inside and explore simultaneous realities through spherical video clips shot by Fisher and Roth on various locations on campus.

Several projects use SnapdragonAR software, an innovative "drag and drop" AR interface developed in the lab in collaboration with computer vision researchers Andrei Rotenstein and Mikhail Sizintsev, PhD candidates in computer science, and Dr. Mark Fiala. Snapdragon allows people without computer programming skills to easily build AR experiences. This software is now available for sale through Future Stories, a spin-off company 91ŃÇɫ’s AR Lab established to provide participants with the option of commercializing their lab developments.

The Snapdragon projects created in the lab by graduate students include Papagiannis' sound toy wonder turner; Boaz Berri’s Neighbours, which fills an image of an apartment complex with videos of life inside the building; Carter Bruce, Anne Koizumi and Claudia Sicondolfo’s The Underground Cave, which animates a model of an underground space; and a work-in-progress by Evelyn Tchakarov. Fisher will also be showing an AR tabletop theatre piece called Circle which was presented for the first time last December as part of the Digital Arts & Culture conference at the . Wallace Edwards, a Governor General's Literary Award-winning children’s book illustrator, will show some recent experiments with AR illustrations that come to life in your hands.

Above: A collection of images from the Snapdragon projects created in the lab by graduate students

Another computer program developed in-house is an iPhone GPS video-caching application created by Roth and Rotenstein. Akin to a technological Easter egg hunt, when the application is running, the iPhone will display a digital surprise – in this case a film clip – when it is physically located at a predetermined GPS coordinate. CommCult master's student Magda Olszanowski's Suivez Moi was built using the GPS software. An outdoor demo of her project is available now by appointment (call 416-736-2100 ext. 21077), but the lab hopes these locative film experiences will be available for download through the Apple app store in the near future.

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91ŃÇɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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