You're high above the desert peaks. Your aircraft are approaching their targets. Information from instruments, cameras, and radar is before your eyes. And with the help of 100 million pixels of bright and vivid virtual reality, you're in control of a swarm of U.S. Air Force unmanned aerial vehicles.
That virtual battlespace is just one of the applications you can experience at the improved C6 virtual reality room at Iowa State University's Virtual Reality Applications Center, which was unveiled in late April.
Located on the Iowa State campus in Ames, C6 opened in June 2000 as the country's first six-sided virtual reality room designed to immerse users in images and sound. The original design of the center, completed by Mechdyne Corp. of Marshalltown in June 2000, was equipped for CRT-based projection resolution of 1024x1024 on each of the 10x10-foot walls, ceiling, and floor, resulting in a total resolution on all six walls of 6.3 million pixels. The graphics and projection technology that made such immersion possible hadn't been updated since the C6 opened.
Iowa State's C6 now projects 4096x4096 resolution -- 16 times the pixels produced by the original C6. The difference between the original equipment and the updated technology "is like putting on your glasses in the morning," said James Oliver, director of VRAC and a professor of mechanical engineering.
The new equipment includes a Hewlett-Packard computer cluster featuring 96 graphics processing units, 24 Sony SXRD digital projectors, an eight-channel audio system, and ultrasonic motion tracking technology. Again installed by Mechdyne, the nearly $5 million in equipment upgrades are supported by a U.S. Department of Defense appropriation through the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
Mechdyne’s technology overlaps and optically blends the images from four Sony SXRD projectors on each wall to create seamless, high-resolution 3-D imagery. The 4K projectors each deliver a pixel matrix of 4096x2160, delivering more than four times the resolution of HDTV sets for home theater use. Each projector’s 5000 lumens of brightness are more than 20 times the brightness of the original CRTs, which also contributes to the image’s impact.
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Oliver is leading the research team that's using C6 to develop a control interface for the military's next generation of UAVs. The researchers are building a virtual environment that allows operators to see the vehicles, surrounding airspace, and terrain they're flying over, as well as information from instruments, cameras, radar, and weapons systems. The system would allow a single operator to control many vehicles.
"The idea is to get the right information to the right person at the right time," Oliver said. "There's a tsunami of information coming toward you and you have to convey it effectively. We think this kind of large-scale, immersive interface is the only way to develop sophisticated controls.
"This upgrade will enhance our ability to amplify the creativity and productivity of people. It will help us build on the center's record as a world leader in virtual reality. And it's one more way Iowa State can be the best at putting science and technology to work."
MORE INFO
HP hp.com
Mechdyne mechdyne.com
Sony sony.com/government
VRAC vrac.iastate.edu
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