AIM Academy is creating an online learning platform that will introduce industry and students to the emerging field of integrated photonics. The 3D Integrated Photonics Virtual Lab will be designed for community college, undergraduate, graduate students, as well as industry professionals. It will provide a game-based learning environment that allows users to explore photonic integrated circuits (PICs) at both a component and system level to gain insights into PIC design and manufacturing.
AIM Academy in the future will offer a library of simulations, that you will be able to try out on this site, and will be included in MITx courses that AIM Academy is launching.
To learn more about AIM Academy's Virtual Lab, please contact Erik Verlage.
Student Collaborators:
Stuart Daudlin
In the summer of 2018 I ran optical simulations to explore the physics of the optical components and created a pipeline for giving the simulated data to the user interface. Over the summer, I gained experience in simulating silicon photonic devices and working with a team to connect data from simulations with other software platforms.
Sameena A Shaffeullah
My background experience is in backend processes. In Spring 2018, I was interested in working on a project that while still backend, was more closely related to the frontend. I worked on data integration/visualization for the very first Virtual Lab simulation which showed radiative modes escaping from a radial waveguide bend. I created a data structure to hold real data and I wrote code to display that data in text, images, and a graph, as it is discovered by the user. From this UROP, I learned Unity, a tool I had never used before, and how to create modular code that could be used for all types of data and for simulations other than the one I worked on.
Sophia S Russo
I am completing my master's degree in Computer Science, with an emphasis on Computer Graphics and HCI as applied to educational games. For this project, I worked on the visualizations for the photonics phenomena demonstrated in the simulations, as well as on creating tools for designers that allow further development of simulations without needing to touch the underlying code. I was very excited to be a part of this project and that I was able to learn more about how to create visually engaging applications.
Victor Cheng
I am studying Computer Science at MIT, with a strong interest in software engineering and game development. I joined the AIM Photonics Academy team in Spring of 2018 as a UI/UX developer, and helped redesign the look and feel of the Virtual Lab. Through working collaboratively on innovative software and platforms, I gained invaluable experience both as an engineer and as a team player.