USask's 'Airplane Room' Brought to Life in Virtual Reality and Wins Top Research Prize

Tucked inside the Thorvaldson Building is a room that USask students never quite forget. The Henry Taube Lecture Theatre, room 271 is better known simply as the “Airplane Room”. Nicknamed after the paper airplanes lodged in its 68ft domed ceiling, the room has quite the history. Legend has it, they were thrown there by WWII pilots in training, whose loved ones would later visit the room to check if their plane still held. A fallen plane meant the pilot wasn’t coming home.

Now thanks to Computer Science department head, Ian Stavness, the historical space has a new life as a visual replica that anyone, anywhere in the world can explore. Stavness has been awarded the grand prize in USask’s Images of Research contest for a digital rendering of the Airplane Room created using a technique called 3D Gaussian splatting. The image is a split rendering, one side presenting a photorealistic virtual replica of the theatre and the other showing the millions of optimized 3d points that make it possible.

Using a consumer spatial camera, Stavness walked through the lecture hall for about five minutes, capturing it from every angle. After 30 minutes of computation, the Airplane Room had a digital twin with each desk, wall lamps, projectors and paper airplanes in the ceiling all accounted for. 

The choice of location was personal, “My goal was to capture the most iconic space on campus,” Stavness said, “and since Computer Science is housed in the Thorvaldson Building, I chose the Henry Taube Lecture Theatre.” The project is also part of something bigger. Over the past two summers, Stavness has worked with undergraduate student researchers to apply these same 3D capture techniques to plant modeling and measurement through the lab’s splat.usask.ca platform with future collaborations planned in AgBio and the School for the Arts. 

When told he had won the grand prize, Stavness kept the focus on his team. “I was thrilled for the recognition but moreso I’m glad for the recognition of the BIG lab and all of the computer graphics students I’ve worked with over my time at USask.” With a fresh group of undergraduate researchers joining this summer, the next classic Usask space is already in his sights.