UMBC’s Imaging Research Center employs innovative strategies to help researchers across the disciplines share their vision.
For 25 years, UMBC’s Imaging Research Center (IRC) has taken an entrepreneurial approach to leveraging new technologies and emerging media platforms to help researchers across the disciplines tell their stories using a wide range of visual media.
In the late 1980s, when the IRC was founded, personal computers were only just emerging and mobile phones didn’t exist. Now, in 2013, the IRC’s state-of-the-art facilities enable research in 3D visualization, immersive technologies, interactive installations, feature-length films, social media, and mobile device applications.
A hub of campus research activity, the IRC works with faculty and researchers in departments and centers across the disciplines. “At the Imaging Research Center here at UMBC, we use the broadest definition of the word ‘imaging,’” says Dan Bailey, director of the Imaging Research Center. “We work with NASA to help the general public understand our climate and our place in the universe. We’ve created a unique and comprehensive visualization of early Washington, D.C. We’ve created virtual sets for theatre, and we’ve brought inanimate objects to life in impossible and aesthetic ways.”
The IRC is also an educational facility where faculty and undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students engage in real-world, project-oriented, creative and collaborative research to complement learning in the classroom and prepare students for further learning and life after the university. The IRC continues to imagine new directions for interdisciplinary research in combination with technologically advanced media that communicate to and resonate with the general public.
Visit this link for a short video presenting the work of UMBC's Imaging Research Center.