News by Subject Technology & Engineering

Structural coloration means that the microstructure of an object causes various colors to appear. For industry, this is an attractive alternative to coloring with pigments. But so far, scientists had primarily experimented with nanostructures observed in nature, or with simple, regular designs. Computer scientists from IST Austria and KAUST now take a different, innovative approach: their tool automatically creates 3D print templates for nanostructures for user-defined colors, and their structures do not follow any particular pattern.

The use of Internet of Things devices in the classroom can have major educational benefits and appeal to both genders if designed and used in the right way, according to new research carried out by the University of Kent.

Most of the plastic objects we see are created using injection molding, but designing such molds is a difficult task, usually requiring experts. Now, computer scientists have created an interactive design tool that allows non-experts to create molds for an object of their choice. The software will be presented at this year's prestigious SIGGRAPH conference, as one of IST Austria's five successful submissions.

When engineers or designers wanted to test the aerodynamic properties of the newly designed car or an airplane, the procedure usually took hours or even a day. Nobuyuki Umetani and Bernd Bickel have now significantly sped up this process, making streamlines and parameters available in real-time. Their method, which is the first to use machine learning to model flow around continuously editable 3D objects, will be presented at this year's prestigious SIGGRAPH conference in Vancouver.