In a darkened room in Howe Hall, Iowa State presented its new virtual reality room, the C6.

The Virtual Reality Applications Center unveiled the C6 on Thursday as part of the Emerging Technologies Conference 2007.

“This is the highest resolution in virtual reality in the world right now,” said Jeff Brum, vice president of marketing and business development of Mechdyne, the company that built the C6.

With more than 100 million total pixels, the C6 surpasses the second highest resolution VR unit by more than 100 percent.

James Oliver, professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Virtual Reality Applications Center, said the second highest virtual reality resolution was 43 million pixels.

The C6 is a box-like room in which the four walls, floor and ceiling are screens. Four projectors, 24 in all, sit behind each screen to provide all sides to the virtual world.

The images are run from computers running on the Red Hat Linux operating system.

They each run the same virtual program, just from a slightly different view to create a patchwork of images on the screens.

It only takes two projectors to provide a basic flat view for each wall that can still encircle the viewer on the inside. The other two projectors are used to create another view slightly different to put the world into stereo.

Glasses are used to regulate this view to make it look real.

“When you really go in and put on theglasses, the walls melt away,” Oliver said. The C6 was running a program displaying a virtual island at the event, created by students simply to show off the system. But the C6 is capable of running a host of programs that can help with many different fields of research and training.

“You’d be surprised how many types of research encounter problems that are inherently spatial,” Oliver said. “This is a real tool for researchers to go in and see how the research connects.”

Another program run on the C6 was the Soybean Plant program. This is for a more biological point of view and actually goes into the 3D plant to reveal the cells, organelles in the cells and structures in the organelles, even down to molecules. This is to show people, especially students, how everything connects and will probably eventually become a computer game, said Eve Wurtele, professor of genetics, development and cell biology.

“It is hard to read a textbook and see a static picture and understand what is going on,” she said.

The next program displayed was the Warrior Training System, a 3D map of Camp Dodge in Johnston, used for training military and getting them used to the terrain before they go out to the facility.

This is another one of the many uses the C6 can be put to.

Oliver likened it to a Swiss Army Knife.

“The cool thing about this is that it is a completely flexible environment that we can use for so many different applications,” Oliver said.

“It’s completely reconfigurable. Software is so infinitely flexible.”

Mechdyne, the company that created the C6, has systems around the world, Brum said.

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research is funding this program through 2009, Oliver said. The research is ongoing. Meanwhile, they will iron out the current program.

“There are a lot of little grooming aspects that will happen in the coming weeks and months,” Oliver said.