WMG doctoral graduate, Pinar Satilmis has received a Faculty of Science Doctoral Thesis Award for her PhD project “High Fidelity Sky Models”.

Pinar’s thesis, “High Fidelity Sky Models” involved investigating innovative ways to simulate light to accurately replicate real world lighting and cloud illumination in virtual environments. Pinar investigated a number of different methods including generating animated virtual environments to model changes in skylight in real time and using machine learning to predict light values.

Project supervisor Professor Alan Chalmers commented, “Accurately relighting objects in virtual reality is key to making virtual environments appear realistic. Dr Satilmis’ work was highly original and provides a step change in modelling sky light compared with all previous approaches.”

Virtual reality is big business, with the market expected to grow from $1.37 billion in 2015 to $33.90 billion by 2022. The impact of this research is likely to be very significant with the recently published results already cited by researchers from the Advanced Rendering Research team at NVidia.

Pinar commented, “I’m really thankful to my thesis supervisors, Professor Alan Chalmers and Dr Kurt Debattista for not only nominating me for the Award but for making studying my PhD a really enjoyable experience.

‘Since graduating, I’ve started working as a research assistant at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey. I’m continuing with my research into machine learning and computer graphics, and hope to contribute more to this area with my future work.”

Pinar received her Doctoral Thesis Award at the Faculty of Science end of year celebrations evening on 13 July 2017.