On June 19, a master’s thesis defense of global significance took place at our Faculty: the members of the evaluation committee wore virtual reality headsets to step into the digital space created by the student, exploring and evaluating the research results within that environment.

The thesis was created by Kinga Kocsis. Her advisors were Gábor Domokos, Professor at BME and co-inventor of the Gömböc and the Bille; Ferenc Répás, Ybl Prize-winning architect and BME Professor; and Lajos Hartvig, co-founder of the Bánáti & Hartvig Architectural Office.

The thesis, titled The Soft Cube, was built on a discovery regarding soft cells made by researchers at BME and the University of Oxford. The achievement garnered international attention: it was reported by Nature magazine, featured on the cover of Scientific American, and even reached the International Space Station thanks to one of Tibor Kapu’s experiments. The thesis translated this mathematical breakthrough into the realms of architecture and virtual reality, utilizing artificial intelligence to tackle a design task based on the mathematical relationships between soft cells and the Rubik’s Cube.

The defense format itself proved pioneering. The presentation took place entirely within a virtual environment—an approach so novel that the live online broadcast was followed, despite time zone differences, by professors from the California College of the Arts, the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford, National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, and the Pratt Institute in New York.

This unconventional thesis defense clearly demonstrated that virtual reality is no longer just opening new horizons in entertainment, education, or industrial applications, but can also fundamentally transform scientific communication and the way research results are presented.

Source: bme.hu