Sam Ekong is a graduate researcher working on the EAGER project, a virtual reality education system, where he has developed calibration routines for virtual reality devices, setup a network infrastructure for multiplayer interaction. He is currently working on integrating a voice chat server and live streaming a teacher model from the kinect.

In his undergraduate years he worked on the project “Graph Sampling, Summarization, and Visualization” under Dr. Christoph Borst and Mehmet Tozal. He will be earning a M.S. degree in Computer Science August 2017. The research conducted while at CVDI has consisted of efficient and effective graph layouts by using summarized graphs to layout the original, various graph sampling and summarization methods with a force based collapsing mechanism, and means of navigating large graphs. Currently Sam is also working with virtual reality for his senior project. There he is building a calibration routine that can pair virtual reality equipment with different sensors into the same coordinate space to allow for a more realistic experience for the user.

During his undergraduate career Sam Ekong has taken a strong liking to computer graphics, going above and beyond in his graphics class by adding advanced techniques such as displacement mapping, fur simulation, and warping shader effects on his flocking simulation project. On the side, Sam is working on a ray tracing engine, a rendering method alternative to the standard rasterizing methods currently used in graphics. With this method it is possible to get what would be costly light, shadows, reflection, and refractions almost effortlessly in exchange for a much more expensive computational baseline. He is currently working on a way to reduce the cost of ray tracing in hopes to bring it down to a level comparable to a rasterizing method equipped with the equivalent amount of effects.