Rainbows over the Jacobs School

Non-photoshopped rainbows over the UC San Diego campus taken on Feb 8, 2013.

In other engineering-related rainbow news, computer science PhD alumnus Iman Sadeghi, who worked with our Oscar-winning computer science professor Henrik Wann Jensen is featured at the very beginning of a article in the Feb 2013 issue of Spirit Magazine, put out by Southwest Airlines.

What was the gist of that rainbow research, that we first covered in December 2011?

COMPUTER SIMULATIONS SHED LIGHT ON THE PHYSICS OF RAINBOWS

Computer scientists at UC San Diego, who set out to simulate all rainbows found in nature, wound up answering  questions about the physics of rainbows as well. The scientists recreated a wide variety of rainbows – primary rainbows, secondary rainbows, redbows that form at sunset and cloudbows that form on foggy days – by using an improved method for simulating how light interacts with water drops of various shapes and sizes. Their new approach even yielded realistic simulations of difficult-to-replicate “twinned” rainbows that split their primary bow in two.

UC San Diego alumnus Iman Sadeghi, who did the work while a Ph.D. student at the Jacobs School of Engineering, his advisor, computer science professor Henrik Wann Jensen, and scientists from Spain, England and Switzerland, are set to publish their findings in ACM Transactions on Graphics in December of this year.

“This goes beyond computer graphics,” Jensen said. “We now have an almost complete picture of how rainbows form.”

Jensen is no stranger to advances in computer graphics. He earned an Academy Award in 2004 for research that brought life-like skin to animated characters. He has worked on a number of Hollywood blockbusters, including James Cameron’s “Avatar.” Read the rest of the story here. 

Sadeghi is no stranger to computer graphics. Remember this butterfly simulation he did WAY back in 2007?