The Virtual Becomes Reality at Iowa State University

The colonel has a problem. He has eight unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) flying over the outskirts of Baghdad, looking for potential insurgent activity. Are those people he sees moving through the streets insurgents or are they a US infantry patrol? If he alters the flight path of one UAV to loiter over the suspicious activity, how should he deploy the other seven UAVs to pick up the first’s original mission? How does he keep track of the positions of the eight UAVs, what they are seeing, and the locations of nearby US troops, all in real-time?

One potential solution is being developed at Iowa State University’s Virtual Reality Applications Center (VRAC). Earlier this year, the center opened its newly redesigned C6 virtual reality environment, a six-sided room (four walls, floor, and ceiling) capable of generating a world-leading 100-million pixels to create a hyper-realistic, immersive 3D experience. The C6 environment was engineered by Mechdyne Corporation (www.mechdyne.com), a leading developer of advanced visual display systems and software, and uses NVIDIA Quadro® technology (www.nividia.com/quadro) for the graphics horsepower.

“The C6 is a completely immersive 3D display, with sound, for a total sensory experience,” says Kurt Hoffmeister, vice president for R&D at Mechdyne. “It really puts you in the middle of whatever is being modeled.”

The C6 is more than 16 times the resolution of a typical immersive room and more than double the resolution of its five-sided, 43-million pixel predecessor, which was also created by Mechdyne.

Not only is the C6 environment applicable to Air Force battlespace management, but it can be used for applications as diverse as urban planning and genomic research. Even Google Earth flythroughs can be improved and enhanced with the technology being developed and tested at VRAC. The C6 environment can be used for traditional virtual reality applications like architectural walkthroughs, as well as for data analysis, displaying multi-variant information in 3D and enabling researchers to perceive patterns that would not be recognized through traditional numerical analysis.