About 20,000 visitors came to the University on Friday and Saturday for the 93rd annual Engineering Open House, where more than 250 exhibits from the College of Engineering showcased the work of the college’s students.
The annual event held every March on the North Quad partnered Engineering with 14 companies to bring demos from each department’s to the public.
The open house gave University students an opportunity to show off their ongoing projects, said Cole Gleason, sophomore in Engineering and a volunteer who oversaw the Siebel Center for the event.
“It’s a way for students and professors … to showcase the projects they’ve been working on,” he said. “Not only that, but also other projects that are of interest to the public, to kids who visit, etc.”
In a dark room on Siebel Center’s ground floor, families and students filtered in and out to see one of the Engineering Open House’s most popular exhibits: an interactive simulation that tracks body movements and projects them onto a wall, creating a “human cosmos.”
Get The Daily Illini in your inbox!
In front of an Xbox Kinect and a large projection screen with stars forming the outline of human bodies, a group of children whirled their hands and watched as their twinkling copy tries to capture asteroids.
“(On the wall) your body is made out of these flickering stars, and your hands have gravity, so as the asteroids come in, they become attracted to your hands and start orbiting around them,” said Jessica Metro, senior in FAA and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the organization that ran the exhibit.
She was joined by RJ Marsan, another member of the RSO and a graduate student in computer science, who relayed what the project means in terms of interactivity with computers.
“We’re just trying to build this big, immersive thing for you to walk into — for you to interact with the computer in a very different way,” Marsan said.
Another exhibit by the Association for Computing Machinery showed a project by Computer Science students titled “Mineral Z,” a Starcraft-inspired tower-defense game.
“We’ve had a lot of people interested in this, especially children and video game fans,” said Rafael Rego Drumond, senior in Engineering.
Loomis Laboratory, another building that housed exhibits, was packed with children over the weekend as volunteers demonstrated experiments ranging from liquid nitrogen ice cream to spinning sugar to create cotton candy.
Austin can be reached at [email protected].
