About Us
Visual Cortex Instruments is a group of professors and educators who grew frustrated with standard freshman labs that are antiquated, do not have a direct pedagogical value, and do not directly probe the core physical concepts that are the foundation of science and engineering.
Typical labs lack context in any other foundational knowledge, such as the operation of electronic devices and programming languages that are today’s fundamental tools for the students of science and engineering.
A while ago we embarked on a journey to envision what ideal freshman physics, science, and engineering labs would look like. We embarked on that journey without being bound by current technology and without any pre-concept in our minds. The resulting visualization instruments are the result of that thought process.
Back to the Basics
We believe that physics labs should allow students to gain physical understanding of the abstract, core concepts that are typically introduced in the lectures. By physical understanding we refer to the deep intuitive understanding of the concept in a concrete, almost palpable, way.
Today’s technology has increased dramatically allowing us to formulate labs that specifically address the shortcomings of the old stereotypical labs. The resulting labs and equipment are based on visualization technology tools mixed with the tools of the trade of current employers in the areas of science and engineering.
These instruments break ground by first allowing students to see linear velocities and acceleration of moving objects in real time, to see angular velocities and accelerations, and effectively visualize electric and magnetic fields of arbitrary shapes in quasi-real time. Students don’t just “see” this data, but the data is recorded so students must analyze it at posteriori.
Institutions typically develop their own lab write-ups based off our equipment, but we provide a set of standard lab write-ups with high pedagogical content that directly asks the students to solve specific, and very enticing, problems that can only be solved if the underlying physics concepts are well understood and applied. See our videos for examples of these writeups.
The versatility and amount of data coming off our visualization stations is enormous and allows the students to not only “see” things in real time, and therefore obtain the first level of physical understanding, but also analyze and test core concepts. Most importantly, convince themselves of the validity of them.
With our lab equipment we don’t have to tell students the direction of the velocity and acceleration of any point in an object, the students sees that in real-time. We don’t tell students that in a system without external torque angular momentum is conserved; instead we can ask the student to experimentally show it is conserved!
We invite you to see a set of freshman physics labs like no other in the world.
CAMPUSES
Visual Cortex Instruments is proud to have our technology at the following University and College systems to bring Physics to life in the classroom.
