Manipulating 3-dimensional animated characters on a 2D screen is challenging and requires years of training. ETH researchers now make animation artists’ life a little easier with a new input device they can assemble into a shape similar to the virtual character.

Marco Altheimer, doctoral student in Prof. Philipp Rudolf von Rohr's team, received the Best Speaker Award for his oral presentation about the paper "Optical investigation of bubbly flows in highly porous structures" at the iCAIM - International Conference on Applications for Image Based Measurements 2014 in Leipzig, Germany, 24 to 25 June 2014.

Prof. Marco Mazzotti was awarded with the title of Doctor honories causa from the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg (Germany). He is being recognized for his efforts in process engineering, in particular for developing the scientific bases to study various separation processes.

Michael Gloor, doctoral student in the group of Prof. Leonhard Kleiser, received the Best Student Technical Paper award for his paper on the aeroacoustics of heated coaxial jets that he presented at the 20th AIAA Aeroacoustics Conference (Atlanta, USA, June 2014). At the PASC Conference 14, Zurich, June 2014, Michael Gloor received both the Best Poster Award (Physics), and the Visualization Award.

Last week, researchers from Prof. Roland Siegwart’s team presented their strategy at the IEEE International Conference of Robotics and Automation (ICRA) on how walking robots can more safely cross dangerous terrain.

Not one… but two ETH-Zurich spin-offs managed to convince the judging panel from the venture kick initiative and win an advancement award of CHF 130,000. The best start-up projects of the year’s first quarter were a sun-protection app and a chair that can walk.

The MSRL-Team won 1st place at the ICRA 2014 Mobile Microrobotics Challenge (MMC). The paper "Automated Capsulorhexis Based on a Hybrid Magnetic-Mechanical Actuation System", F. Ullrich, S. Schuerle, R. Pieters et. al won the Best Medical Paper Award. In the same category, the paper "Self-Folding Mobile Microrobots for Biomedical Applications" by S. Fusco, M. Sakar et. al was nominated as a finalist.