The Iowa Stater
September1996
A room with a (virtual) view
omewhere between reality and fantasy, a team of researchers at Iowa State's
Center for Emerging Manufacturing Technology (ICEMT) plans to set up shop.
One of its goals is to blur the distinction between what is real and what is
not. Immersive virtual reality environment is scientific jargon for the world that Carolina Cruz-Neira and James Oliver are creating on the first floor of Black Engineering. Cruz-Neira, associate scientist at the center, and Oliver, center associate director, are using computer technology to create virtual worlds that look and sound like the real thing.
In the virtual environment, you can drag a molecule of an
AIDS-fighting drug to an infected blood cell and watch what happens. You can
meander through a building before the first I-beam is hoisted. You even can
walk across the Iowa State campus in the year 2000 passing buildings that
exist today only as proposals.
You can reach for the stair railing in one of those virtual buildings, but the railing only exists in the neural connections between your eyes and your mind.
What's really happening while you're picking up molecules and walking around in nonexistent buildings? Youre standing in a 12x12 foot room, wearing a special set of 3-D glasses and hanging on to a souped-up joystick. Around you are large projection screens that employ stereo graphics and your 3-D glasses to produce realistic images.
"When we have everything in and calibrated," Cruz-Neira promised, "it will be very hard to tell where reality ends and virtual reality begins."
The ISU virtual environment is the latest high-tech, computer-powered virtual reality rage. It has had a short but stunning evolutionary process. Cruz-Neira developed many of the basic principles of the environment when she was at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where she designed an immersive environment called the CAVE. At Iowa State, Cruz-Neira is setting up an environment based on the original CAVE, but with several advanced technological improvements.
A highly sought researcher, Cruz-Neira chose Iowa State over several
offers (including one from NASA) because of the excellent researchers and
team players at ICEMT, she said, and because of opportunities to move
virtual environment from a curiosity to a tool for applied research.
ISUs virtual environment is large enough to accommodate some extra-special effects.
"For example, we can place the seat and cab of a vehicle in it and produce the rest of the vehicle virtually," Oliver said. "By connecting the vehicle controls to simulators of the actual controls, we can 'drive' a virtual prototype."
It's sort of like testing an experimental car, but only having to build the drivers seat before taking it for a spin.
The advantages of such fake environments are very real to scientists, both in industry and academia. Virtual environments are good testing grounds for almost anything. They may allow researchers and manufacturers to simulate the performance of factory robots, the effects of drugs on molecules, space shuttle maneuvers, and even the evolution of a star system or galaxy.
"There really are no limits to potential applications for this technology in terms of ideas," Cruz-Neira said. "As far as practical applications, there still are a lot of things that we do not have the computational power to do."
The cost of ISU's virtual environment will be roughly
$1 million. ICEMT is funding the project with help from ISUs Institute for
Physical Research and Technology, the Carver Foundation and the Office of
Naval Research.
Oliver said he likes the hands-on challenge that virtual environment technology provides.
"We pride ourselves on being an applications-driven research
center,"
Oliver said. "Most academic VR-related research labs are focused on pushing
the envelope of technology. Our focus continues to be on applying
off-the-shelf technology to engineering and scientific challenges."
--University Relations staff
Want to know more? Check out the Center for Emerging Manufacturing Technology's homepage.
The Iowa Stater, stater@iastate.edu, University Relations
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