The Collaborative Research Centre 161 “Quantitative Methods for Visual Computing” is an interdisciplinary research centre at the University of Stuttgart and the University of Konstanz, funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under project number 251654672. Ulm University and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München are participating institutions in the second funding period, which started in 2019, following the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen in the first funding period.

The goal of SFB/Transregio 161 is establishing the paradigm of quantitative science in the field of visual computing, which is a long-term endeavour requiring a fundamental research effort broadly covering four research areas, namely quantitative models and measures, adaptive algorithms, interaction and applications. In the second funding period, new research directions are being approached, such as integrating machine learning, algorithms for real-time and dynamic adaptions and combining quantitative and qualitative methods. Furthermore SFB/Transregio 161 is looking into the quantification of immersion, acknowledging the raising interest in the whole spectrum of mixed reality applications in the recent past. Finally, the second funding period also addresses studies in the wild, working on evaluation methods for unconstrained studies.

In SFB/Transregio, approximately 40 scientists in the fields of computer science, visualisation, computer vision, human computer interaction, linguistics and applied psychology are jointly working on improving the quality of future visual computing methods.