From: cyberoid@u.washington.edu (Bob Jacobson) Subject: EDUC: Royal Melbourne Inst. of Technology Date: Thu, 7 May 1992 07:18:14 GMT Message-ID: <1992May7.071814.29181@u.washington.edu> Organization: HIT Lab, Seattle WA. This report is from Mark Billinghurst, formerly an intern at the UW HIT Lab and now doing his graduate work in New Zealand. He posted this info to the HIT Lab after touring at RMIT. Anything dubious may in part be attributed to the fact that this is a Kiwi report on a 'Roo installation. :-) Date: Mon, 23 Mar 92 15:18 +1200 From: MNB@waikato.ac.nz Anyway about the trip to Melbourne and RMIT, well there's a lot less VR going on than I thought ... Basically RMIT ( the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology ), and the University of Melbourne have formed a collaborative research centre called CITRI and one of their groups is the Advanced Computer Graphics Lab which is doing some VR work. CITRI is a close collaboration between the universities, industry and the Government department of scientific research, CSIRO, and is funded by the local state, national government, and industry contracts. I think they're getting around 7 million dollars in funding, though I don't know how much of that goes to the Computer Graphics Lab. The RMIT computer graphics lab is supposedly the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere with about a dozen researchers ( Comp Sci PhD's ) and 8 students - mostly masters with 1 or 2 PhD students. As far as equipment go they have 12 - 15 personal Irises and a 320 VGX. They also have access to a Cray and a MassPar machine which all staff/students can use. They are the only place in Australia, and probably the Southern Hemisphere doing VR research, although a technical college in Melbourne may be starting to play with some low end PC based stuff. VR research there is pretty limited - there are 3 staff members doing VR related work and a couple of students, they've just got a new person from the University of Utah. They have VPL goggles with right and left gloves and should be getting one of the Cyberarm's from Stanford in a month or so (it's been on order for a year !!). They also have a resident artist as well - somebody called Stelarc who has built a robotic arm and want's to experiment with virtual body parts. He's famous for stripping himself naked, stick fish hooks though his body and hanging himself from trees, buildings roofds of galleries etc ... They don't use VPL's software - Body Electric etc, but have written their own - basically interfaces to their own world building and 3D modelling software. One of their specialities is fast rendering and so far they can get about 800,000 polygons per second out of their VGX. The VR research seems to be mainly in fast real world dynamics with collision detection and real physics etc. Unfortunately they don't havve a NTSC board for their eyephones - VPL said they would send one with the eyephones but didn't - so that means that the worlds are all in black and white - bummer ... They had a rather impressive virtual art demo that let you play with a virtual block of caly on a potters well, squeezing and shaping it with the datagloves which was kind of fun. But not much else apart from an architectural fly though. As far as fees etc go.. For an American you have to pay a foreign student fee which is $14,000 Australian -- but if you enroll you'd get a $7,000 a year tutorship/programming job in the Comp Sci. Dept. which would take about 4-6 hours a week. The Comp Sci. dept is desperate for grad students - they have 13 and have a capacity for 28 ( about 25 staff members ). If you got Australian residency - not too hard to get, I think you just need to live there for a year - then you would pay only about $1000 in fees, maybe less and also you'd be eligible to apply for scholarships - typically around $16,000. So with residency, a tutorship and a scholarship you'd be getting about $25,000 a year !! I guess that's about $18,000 US for less than 10 hours a week work !! However the scholarships are pretty competitive programming/system admin work in Melbourne - there's lots of high tech/computing companies there. As far as the degree goes the MS typically takes 2 years and can be either by all course work or course work and a thesis - the thesis is original work and takes about 9 - 12 months. The PhD takes 2-3 years of full time research work, with no coursework or qualifying exams. Of course you can do these both parttime which would double the time needed. Depending on what you want to do they may require you to sit in on some courses but you won't have any formal assesment on them. If you supervisor doesn't think you're making sufficient progress after a year then your PhD may be downgraded to a MS. With your background you should have no problem getting accepted to the PhD program. As for Melbourne itself it's a wonderful place to live from all accounts. There are 3 million people there from an amazingly diverse range of cultures. There are a lot of greeks and italians and recently asians have started moving there in droves. Living costs are pretty cheap - maybe around $10,000 Australian a year to live really well. There's lot's of life and culture. RMIT has it's own student radio and TV stations and seems to have a very active student population as well. The only bad things I heard is that the weather is very unpredictable - hot in the morning and hailing in the afternoon. So that's the holiday trip report - if you have any questions send me mail .. Ovverall I think that becuase of the very low student/staff ratio, the good funding and the equipment that RMIT would be a pretty good place to study - espescially if you could spend time back in the States to overcome the isolation of Australia. The RMIT group is more tightly focused than the HIT lab on rendering and world modelling issues and they have a lot of expertise in the area. They don't have the global vision of the HIT lab but what they do they do well. So if you want to be a big fish in a