Since we first released our Tactile Universe add-ons six years ago Blender has undergone several significant updates. The latest major update (Blender 4.3.2 as of Jan 2025) has made some minor changes to the user interface and a few other changes under the hood. To keep up to date with these changes we have just … Continue reading Tactile Universe add-on V5.0
Blog
Creating Gravitational Wave Models
As part of our latest round of funding, we have created all new resources to help teach students about gravitational waves. In this blog post, I will introduce the new 3D models and how we went about designing them. Gravitational Waves Produced by Back Hole Mergers Once we decided to make resources for gravitational waves … Continue reading Creating Gravitational Wave Models
Tactile Universe add-on V4.0
Sine we first released our Tactile Universe add-ons two years ago Blender has undergone a significant update. Blender 2.80 vastly improved the user interface and many other changes under the hood. It took a bit of time, but today we have released V4.0 of our add-on that is fully compatible with the latest version of … Continue reading Tactile Universe add-on V4.0
Scaling up production and working with resin
As part of our STFC funding we made 20 kits of galaxy models. Early on we realized that 3D printing all the galaxies would take over 20 weeks of non-stop printing, so we started looking into ways of mass producing our galaxies. To help with this process we partnered with Ted Turnbull who is part … Continue reading Scaling up production and working with resin
Making boxes with a laser cutter
In a previous blog post I covered how to design and print holders for our galaxy models. This method works great if you only need to make a few holders, but as we need to make 20 of them, we decided to look into faster means of production. After talking with friends over at the … Continue reading Making boxes with a laser cutter
Tactile Universe Workshops
If you are a teacher, science communicator, outreach officer or an interested member of the public who would like to use our resources with your local VI community, we would like to invite you to join us for a day of learning about the project and the free resources that we have to offer. The … Continue reading Tactile Universe Workshops
Meet the Team: Cordi Scott (Public Engagement Advisor)
About me I have recently taken on the role of Public Engagement and Outreach Manager at the ICG, University of Portsmouth, while Jen Gupta is on maternity leave. Before moving to the ICG I was the Engagement Officer at the School of Physical Sciences, University of Kent. I’ll be using my skills and experience of … Continue reading Meet the Team: Cordi Scott (Public Engagement Advisor)
Meet the Team: Jen Gupta (Public Engagement Advisor)
 About me I am the Public Engagement and Outreach Manager at the ICG. This means that I am responsible for the outreach and public engagement programme for the Institute, running our schools physics outreach programme in Portsmouth and supporting our PhD students, post-docs, and academics to engage members of the public with their research. I … Continue reading Meet the Team: Jen Gupta (Public Engagement Advisor)
Meet the Team: Coleman Krawczyk (Technical Lead)
About me I am an astronomer turned data scientist working the the ICG. When I am not working on Tactile Universe I work as a developer for the Zooniverse focusing on data aggregation and a little bit of front-end work. For the Tactile Universe I act as Technical Lead, that means I figure out how … Continue reading Meet the Team: Coleman Krawczyk (Technical Lead)
Meet the Team: Nic Bonne (Project Lead)
About me I am a blind observational astronomer from Australia. After finishing my PhD in 2014, I moved to the UK and soon discovered that I actually enjoyed leaving my office to talk to people about astronomy more than I enjoyed staying in it, stuck behind a computer writing code and papers. I also realised that … Continue reading Meet the Team: Nic Bonne (Project Lead)
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