The Computer Science Department at the College of Charleston is offering a Computer Graphics and Visualization Seminar Series beginning January 23, 2015.

The series is free and open to the public. All seminars will take place at Harbor Walk West Auditorium, which is part of the College’s Harbor Walk facilities located at 360 Concord St. in downtown Charleston.

The first seminar, “Creating 3D Applications using WebGL and HTML5,” will take place at 3:30 p.m. January 23. The guest speaker for the first seminar is Edward Angel, professor emeritus of computer science at the University of New Mexico and Founding Director of the Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory.

RELATED: See a complete list of topics and speakers for the seminar series.
computer graphics

The green screen at the College’s Harbor Walk campus

Computer science faculty members Brent Munsell, Tony Leclerc and William Bares developed the series as a way to show students that there is more to the computer science field than developing apps for iTunes.

“Since we each had a background in computer graphics and visualization, we thought having a seminar series on this topic would be a great opportunity to demonstrate how academic and industry organizations are using state-of-the-art computer graphics and visualization techniques to address challenging problems in scientific, motion picture, and gaming applications,” Munsell said. “We also wanted students to see that computer science is more than just code development. For instance, having a computer science degree may mean working in an interdisciplinary team solving problems using neuroimaging data.”

RELATED: Learn more about the College’s computer science program.

The organizers hope to expand the series in future years to include industry-sponsored events and workshops for high school and university students as well as technology professionals.

The dates, topics and speakers for all of the 2015 seminars are as follows:

  • January 29 – Edward Angel, ARTS Lab University of New Mexico – “Creating 3D Applications using WebGL and HTML5.”
  • February 6 – Stephen Aylward, Kitware North Carolina – “Accelerating Medical Visualization Research via Open-Source Platforms and Practices.”
  • February 20 – Brent Mason, NaturalPoint Inc. – “3D Application Development Using Marker-based Motion Capture Technologies.”
  • March 20 – Ben Davis, Moondog Animation Studio – “Creating Feature-length Films Using 3D Animation Techniques.”
  • April 3 – Alexander Huth and James Gao, The Gallant Lab UC Berkeley – “Neural Decoding and The Brain Viewer.”
  • Date TBD – Doug Roble, Creative Director of Software at Digital Domain – “Computer Graphics and Motion Picture Films.”