uselton@wk207.nas.nasa.gov (Samuel P. Uselton) (11/07/90)
Hello from a lurker. This is in response to your request for reports on lab work. Feel free to post this to sci.virtual-worlds. I'm not really clear on how posting to a moderated group ordinarily works. Our group at NASA Ames has started a VR project we are calling the "Virtual Wind Tunnel". The project is an attempt to take technology developed mainly in the VIEW lab here at NASA Ames (Scott Fisher's group, for those who index by person rather than acronym) and make a "useful" application. Our group's focus is visualization and user interfaces specifically for exploring and understanding the output of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) codes. CFD simulates flow of a fluid around a body, in our case usually air around an airplane. The flows are very complicated and the data sets large. Many of our visualization tools start off as metaphors for the exploration of flows done in wind tunnels. The goal of the Virtual Wind Tunnel Project is a system that will permit more than one flow scientist (physicist, aero. engineer,...) to interact with 3D time varying flow calculation results. The main people doing the work so far are Steve Bryson and Creon Levit. Several of the rest of us are marginally involved (Jeff Hultquist, Al Globus and myself in particular). I helped Steve and Creon demonstrate our current prototype at Visualization 90. Our hardware is a boom mounted, head tracking, stereo viewer and a VPL glove, being driven by a SGI 320/VGX workstation. The demo allows the operator to see the surface of the body in the flow, rendered as outlined polygons (with hidden lines removed), and to use the polhemus on the glove to start a particle trace (think of the smoke emitter in a wind tunnel) from any location and see where it would go. 3-D flow but steady (not time varying). Gestures allow freezing a trace, starting a new one, grabbing the model (to allow it to be repositioned/oriented), and maybe a few more. We chose the boom mount over a head mount because we wanted the better resolution and brightness attainable from crt's, and because we are hoping to do a color upgrade with this brightness and resolution. CRT's are too heavy for head mount. The boom has built in tracking. A scientist actually using it in an office can look away to answer phone or see who's at the door without taking anything off OR changing the view. He can call someone else to see exactly what he is looking at. The boom was made for us by Fake Space systems, who showed it at Cyberthon. There are also some other VR type projects going on here at Ames, mainly in the Human Factors directorate (the parent organization of the View lab). Beth Wenzel and Scott Foster are doing synthesized locality specific acoustics. Lou Hitchner is working on a planetary exploration system based on recon photos. (The sample database is Mars.) I'll let them report their own details if they want. Sam Uselton uselton@nas.nasa.gov employed by CSC working for NASA speaking for myself