Graduate students working with the latest technology got to show off their accomplishments at the Emerging Technology Conference on Friday at Howe Hall.

“This event is all about the Virtual Reality Applications Center,” said Levi Swartzentruber, graduate student in mechanical engineering. “We’re showing off the projects we’ve been working on for so long.”

A variety of intriguing and technologically impressive projects were on display in the VRAC. Some notable demos were the Amazing Universe demo and the Medical Data project.

The crowd favorite was the Amazing Universe demo, which had an cutting-edge concept and superior technology to back it up. The entrance to the C6 virtual lab was never without a line of people waiting to get in and take a tour of the universe and a neighboring fictional asteroid belt, which was the goal all along.

“This isn’t something we did for us,” said Brandon Newendorp, graduate student in mechanical engineering. “The goal was really to showcase the C6.”

The C6 recently went through an upgrade process that made it the highest resolution virtual reality lab in the country, with more than 1 million pixels displayed on all sides of the small room.

Newendorp and his partner, Christian Noon, graduate in mechanical engineering, packed a significant amount of work into the impressive technical demo that only took a short time to make.

“We did this in a couple of weeks,” Noon said. “But we both have a lot of background with the applications used to make this, and those few weeks were filled with 12-hour days. Something like this usually takes six to seven weeks.”

Though some might see demos like these as just three-dimensional fantasies, some people in the corporate world take projects like these very seriously.

“Most of the demos that were shown today, they have research grants backing them up,” Newendorp said.

The Medical Data project’s goal is to assist doctors and surgeons by taking the different images taken by X-rays and medical scans and condensing them into a three-dimensional image that doctors can manipulate to assist in surgeries.

This would help them analyze the exact dimensions of objects needing to be removed, like tumors, and also assist in the placement of orthoscopic cameras to aid the actual surgery.

“Each project is at varying stages, but the medical application is nearing completion,” Swarzentruber said. “They’re in the process of commercializing it now. Other projects, the concepts are there but the technology isn’t at the same level.”