Google Summer of Code Student Projects Announced

Earlier this year VTK was selected as a Google Summer of Code mentoring organization. This program encourages student participation in open source communities through three-month paid development projects. There are two student projects for VTK, one on chemistry visualization and one on algorithms from IEEE VisWeek.

Marcus Hanwell will mentor David Lonie, who will focus on creating a native implementation of tools to visualize molecular systems and electronic structure in VTK. He will also work on developing additional functionality such as plotting molecular orbital diagrams, visualizing spectroscopic tensors, animating geometry optimizations and rendering periodic crystal structures.

Jeff Baumes will mentor Tharindu De Silva, who will work on implementing and integrating three of the leading algorithms published in VisWeek 2010 into the VTK framework. The first algorithm is an optimization-based axis-labeling technique that optimizes the format, font, size, and orientation of the axis-labels. The second is a cell location technique that can be used as an improved alternative to the existing techniques available in VTK. The third is a 3D-vector-field rendering technique to represent stream surfaces.

Kitware is pleased to be participating in this year’s Summer of Code and is looking forward to working with the next generation of open-source developers.