Royal approval for Queen Mother Building

HRH The Princess Royal has officially opened the Queen Mother Building, the new home for the University's Division of Applied Computing.

The Princess last visited the University two years ago when she laid the foundation stone for the £6 million building. At that time she expressed a keen interest in returning to Dundee to see it completed.

Dr Peter Gregor, head of Applied Computing, was delighted to welcome Her Royal Highness back to the University and show her the QMB, which offers state of the art facilities for teaching and research.

The late Queen Mother kindly gave her name to the centre shortly before her death to leave a legacy of her long association with the University - she became the first Chancellor of the independent University of Dundee in 1967.

"The Princess Royal has taken a keen interest in the project to develop the Queen Mother Building and did get us underway two years ago, so it is marvellous that she is back at the University to perform the official opening," said Dr Gregor.

The Princess met staff involved in the construction of the Queen Mother Building before being shown demonstrations of some of the research being carried out in the Division of Applied Computing across its four main research strands - interactive systems design, assistive and healthcare technologies, the Space Technology Centre, and computational systems.

Some of the work on show was:

• a storytelling project which has linked schoolchildren in Dundee, Colombia, Canada and Chile,
• planet surface simulations which render realistic surface models of Mercury, Mars, the Moon and asteroids to support testing of planetary landers,
• "Social Mobiles" - inspired by the frustration and anger caused by other people's mobile phones, the Social Mobiles are five phones which modify their user's behaviour to make it less disruptive,
• a computer vision system which tracks and monitors the activity of a house occupant and can detect unusual movements, such as a fall.

The Princess also met some of the students who are now making use of the building's distinctive teaching "pods" and watched a role-playing workshop.