Dr Norman Murray

Post Nominals	PhD MSc BSc (Hons)
Biography	Dr Norman Murray is a Lecturer of Computer Science at the University of Salford. His main teaching duties are aligned with his areas of research. This involves teaching virtual reality technology, both hardware and software and 3D games programming to final year BSc. He also teaches Computer Systems Internals and Linux to the first year students. Prior to his appointment as a lecturer he was a researcher at the University and has worked on a range of EPSRC and EU projects, including FutureHome, DIVIPRO, and AVPRC. He has been working in the area of virtual reality for over a decade, and researched the use of immersive virtual reality in the construction, engineering and maintenance domains, as well as contributing to international journals and conferences.
Research Interests	Supporting Communicational Eye Gaze across a distance (Co-investigator) Eye catching was an EPSRC funded project that sought to communicate eye gaze across a distance through video and computer graphic technology. The partners were University of Salford, UCL, University of Reading, University of Roehampton, Electrosonic, Visual Acuity, Avinti Screen Media and SGI. Future_Workspaces (Research Fellow) The mission of this roadmap project was to define the 2010 European Vision of Collaborative Engineering Workspaces of the Future and to identify future research challenges in implementing this collective vision by bringing key players across Europe. North West Research Centre for Advanced Virtual Prototyping (Research Fellow) The Universities of Salford, Manchester, UMIST and Lancaster received £1.7m from the Office of Science and Technology (OST) and EPSRC to establish a Research Centre for Advanced Virtual Prototyping. The aim of this Centre was to provide research leadership in developing virtual prototyping technology for supporting innovative engineering design in 3D through improved interaction, visualisation and simulation techniques. Project Partners : North West Aerospace Alliance, North West Engineering Sector Panel, BAE Systems (aerospace and marine), Kvaener, Magnox Electric, BNFL, Brother (Europe), Unilever, W.M.Engineering, Health and Safety Laboratory. Virtual Environment for Supporting Maintainability Assessment During Design (Research Assistant) The aim of this research was to develop a constraint-based virtual environment that enables maintenance tasks to be assessed during the design phase of a product. Project Partners: Rolls-Royce, Aeroengine Plc, BAE Systems, D-Cubed, EDS Parasolid FutureHome (Research Assistant) FutureHome was a 3-year, £3.5m project funded by EU Brite-Euram involving 15 industrial, research, and academic partners from six European countries. The FutureHome project supported research in the design of modular housing structures and their assembly methods and their automation processes. Partners included: Building Research Establishment, Corus, Imperial College, Unisys and VTT. Kaleidoquery: A Visual Query Language for Object Databases (PhD Student) This PhD project was conducted at the Information Management Group, the University of Manchester, and looked at creating a visual query language for ODMG compliant object databases, and designing an environment to allow for the construction of these queries and for viewing their results.
Teaching and Learning	Leader of the modules Computer Systems Internals and Linx, Virtual Reality and 3D Games, Project for SE, Project for Computer Science and Security Project.