UvA

RobertBelleman

Lecturer and researcher
Manager of the Visualisation Lab at Science Park

Visiting address: Office L6.23 at Lab42 · Science Park 900 · 1098XH Amsterdam · The Netherlands
Postal address: Postbus 94323 · 1090GH Amsterdam · The Netherlands
(+31) 20 525 7272 · R.G.Belleman@uva.nl

Interests

XR/MR/VR/AR, Scientific Visualisation, Computer Graphics. You can probably tell I'm a visual thinker. Most of my professional interests revolve around graphics and visualization, always with the purpose to invoke a "aha!" experience with people.

VR/AR in Education

Applications of Virtual and Augmented Reality to enrich learning

In education we sometimes find subjects and concepts that are difficult to teach using conventional teaching methods. These may for example be difficult to imagine, while others may be too dangerous or too expensive to study in real life. These subjects can benefit from teaching modules that use VR and/or AR as the way to communicate these subjects.

Here are some examples:

Development of the human embryo
Development of the human embryo in AR

Using 3D models provided to us by the Department Medical Biology at Amsterdam UMC, we built an AR app to interactively explore the data from the 3D Atlas of Human Embryology. This application provides an unprecedented educational tool to study the development of the human embryo with little more than a modern smartphone.

Anatomy of a frog
Frog anatomy in AR

In one of the projects for my course on Scientific Visualization and Virtual Reality, I had students create an Augmented Reality app to study the anatomy of a frog, using the "WholeFrog" dataset. The objective was to create an intuitive application that would allow students to study the frog's anatomy using just their smartphone and a printed marker. The application had to have interaction facilities by which specific tissue types could be selectively made (in)visible.

Studying molecular symmetry in AR
Molecular symmetry in AR

Molecular symmetry is a fundamental concept in chemistry to understand the chemical properties of a molecule. Conventional teaching methods use special notations to represent the spatial arrangement of a molecule, but these can be hard to interpret. Other methods use physical models, but these are not always available to students. For his bachelor graduation project in 2017, Rob Kunst developed an Augmented Reality application for smartphones that uses marker recognition to interactively explore the symmetrical properties of a molecule.

Learning to program in VR
Programming in VR

In 2015, Tessa Klunder created a VR environment for children to teach them the fundamentals of programming. The application put them in a robot placed in a virtual maze that could only be escaped by programming the robot to escape the maze. The children would solve increasingly more difficult mazes until they eventually implement the right-hand rule wall follower algorithm to exit any maze. (thesis)

Anxiety in Virtual Reality
Anxiety in VR

In 2015, Iulia Ionescu created a reproduction of the large lecture hall (C1.110) of the Faculty of Science at Science park. The VR application allowed her to place a virtual audience in the lecture hall to help train students with a fear of presenting in front of a large audience. Iulia compared the effect of her application on people presenting in the virtual lecture hall with those presenting in the real lecture hall. (thesis)

2015 - Present

Projects

International research projects and other nifty stuff I have worked on.

DynaNets

Theory and methods for dynamic networks

DynaNets DynaNets was an EU FP7 FET Open project that studied complex systems through dynamically changing networks. My involvement in this project is Twilight; a high-performance interactive visualization application to graphically explore dynamic networks.

2009 - 2011

UrbanFlood

Early warning systems for real time emergency management and routine asset management

UrbanFlood UrbanFlood studied the use of sensors within flood embankments to support an online early warning system, real time emergency management and routine asset management. My work in this projects involved the design and implementation of a decision support system for use in emergency situations.

2009 - 2012

ACGT

Advancing Clinico-Genomic Trials on Cancer

ACGT ACGT was an EU FP6 Integrated Project that studied how high-performance computing facilities provided over Grid infrastructures could facilitate post-genomics research, clinical trials and simulation techniques. I was involved in the development of tools for the visualization of clinical data from simulation predictions as well as the Grid Interface and applications.

2006 - 2010

VL-e

The Virtual Laboratory for eScience

VL-e The Virtual Laboratory for eScience (VL-e) was a Dutch project to enhance scientific research through grid-technology, financed by a BSIK grant from the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OC&W). I coordinated a subprogramme on grid applications for medical imaging and diagnostics. This research consisted of partners from academia and industry, including AMC, VUmc, Philips Research, Philips Medical Systems and IBM.

2003 - 2009

High School Computer Science

Inspiring tomorrow's talent

VL-e I was a Computer Science guest lecturer for students from four Amsterdam high schools: Fons Vitae, Ignatius, Montessori and Sint Nicolaas. Together with high school teachers we created teaching material to stimulate student interest in Computer Science, which certainly helped because a significant number later enlisted at a university! Final-year students worked on a Big Computer Science Project which, during a final demonstration, were graded by UvA professors Lynda Hardman, Harry Buhrman and Paul Klint. The Dutch website Leraar24 created a video of the event that took place in 2011 (in Dutch).

2007 - 2012

UvA-MTT: the UvA Multi-Touch Table

iPad avant la lettre

UvA-MTT For SuperComputing 2008 (SC08) in Austin, TX, we designed and built a multi-touch surface display to demonstrate an application that allows interactive monitoring and control of a programmable computer network. This work was done in collaboration with Laurence Muller, Paul Melis, Rudolf Strijkers and the System and Network Engineering (SNE) group at UvA.

2008 - 2009

Direct gravitational N-body simulations on a GPU

General Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units

GPU Together with Simon Portegies Zwart and Jeroen Bédorf we worked on a GPU implementation of a direct gravitational N-body simulation for astrophysics simulations, implemented in NVIDIA's CUDA. This work attracted quite a lot of attention, which resulted in spin-offs to e.g. molecular dynamics simulations. The New Astronomy paper we wrote about this work got a "Top Cited Article 2005-2010" award from Elsevier.

2006 - 2008

A Window into Virtual Reality

The Dead Cat demo

Dead cat For SuperComputing 2004 (SC04) in Pittsburgh and iGrid 2005 in San Diego we developed an Augmented Reality demonstration for the co-located visualization of virtual objects over physical objects. We showed how a low-performance handheld tablet PC could be used to inspect a CT scan of a panther cub contained in a glass jar filled with ethanol, which is why it became known as "the dead cat demo". This work was a proof-of-concept demonstration for the VL-e project to show that it is possible to create a highly interactive visual experience using high-speed networks and high-performance remote visualization resources.

2004 - 2005

Interactive Exploration in Virtual Environments

My PhD research

Simulated Vascular Reconstruction My PhD research was on the use of interactive virtual environments for decision support. Much of this took place in a CAVE installed at SARA, Amsterdam. As one of the test cases, we built a virtual operating theatre to simulate vascular reconstruction. This environment combines interactive visualisation of patient-specific vascular image data with a flow simulation environment into a virtual operating theatre in which vascular reconstruction procedures can be simulated. We use a lattice Boltzmann flow simulation technique to simulate blood flow through human vascular geometry, the results of which are visualized so that a vascular surgeon can interactively explore alternative treatments for a patient. The idea is that a vascular surgeon uses these simulation results to form a decision on which treatment could be best for a patient.

1997 - 2003

Courses

Courses that I teach.

Scientific Visualization and Virtual Reality

Master Computational Science, Master Computer Science, Master Artificial Intelligence
This course teaches the fundamentals of Scientific Visualization and the use of Virtual Reality (VR) in scientific visualization. Concepts that are covered include: the visualization pipeline, data representation, data transformation algorithms, applications, remote visualization, virtual and augmented reality. In this course you will do a group project using the Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Paraview, Unity. You will also present a chapter from the Visualization Handbook (C.R. Johnson and C.D. Hansen eds.).

Study guide description

Period 1 (September - October)

Graphics and Game Technology

Bachelor Informatica, year 2
This course teaches the fundamentals of Computer Graphics. Concepts that are covered include: the graphics pipeline, rasterization, homogeneous coordinates, linear transformations, projections, modelling 2D and 3D objects, datastructures, lighting, ray tracing, texture mapping, animation, interactive systems, graphics hardware, virtual and augmented reality. Practical assignments are in C using OpenGL.

Study guide description

Period 2 (November - December)

Web programming and Databases

Bachelor Informatica, year 1
This course is in the form of a group project and covers the technology behind interactive web sites. Concepts that are covered include: LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), relational database design, HTTP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, security (markup injection, SQL injection, session hijacking, cross-site scripting).

Study guide description

Period 3 (January)

Bachelor Informatica Graduation Project

Bachelor Informatica, year 3
For most students, the graduation project will be the final obligation before their graduation. In this integrated research project, the student independently exercises his knowledge, insights and skills on a subject that is provided by the team of researchers and lecturers of the Informatics Institute. The research is documented in a thesis that will be reviewed and, if accepted, defended during a final thesis presentation.

Study guide description

If you're a company and you are interested in our students, then please submit a research project proposal.

Period 5 + 6 (April - July)

Skills

Certainly not intended as an exhaustive list (there aren't enough icons for that), more to give you an idea about what makes me tick.

Skills, languages & tools
Hobbies & interests
  • Scuba diving (yes; even in winter in the Netherlands)
  • Tinkering with electronics
  • Music: I play guitar, sing when I have to, and I like to fool around with electronic music