My kind of desk – pre-work within Research IT office, for a touchtable and projection display stand at the University of Manchester Regius Professorship award celebration.

Using the new Acer Predator (17 G9-792) laptop, with an inbuilt great graphics card (NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 970M with 6GB GDDR5 Dedicated Memory), and touchscreen – bits borrowed from UoM and STFC visualisation groups along with (STFC www.CCPi.ac.uk) tomography data and the drishti-prayog volume visualisation software all appear to run extremely sweet.Moving this to the exhibition area within the NGI (National Graphine Institute) with a HDMI splitter should then be suitable for 100’s of viewers per hour …

• The first Regius Professor of Materials in the UK.
• Prof Phil Withers is one of two Regius Professors in the University of Manchester.

Show setup for 150+ special visitors. This example on the screen (one of about 15), just prepared, showed work from by the new EPSRC Flagship CCPi fellowship, Daniil Kazantsev et al from RAL that using multiple volume vis transfer functions highlighted the centre and the fractal edge of slices showing dendritic behaviour (even measurable).

The laptop and small workstation were hidden and all you see is the touchtable, controlled by the operator or user on the right, and the main screen allowing multiple people to view and comment at once.

The volume visualisation was a little tricky as the raw data had been pre-segmented already so I had to create a boundary edge by interpolation and reducing the size of the complete object.

There was a talk by Regius Phil Withers after a presentation of the award from the Queen’s representative, as well as a question and answer session chaired by the President of the University of Manchester.