Instead of putting pilots and drivers into dangerous situations during times of war, new virtual reality research at Iowa State could bring the battlefield to soldiers miles away from the conflict.

Nearly $3 million from the U.S. Department of Defense is slated to come to Iowa State’s Virtual Reality Application Center for the development of new technology that would make the teleoperation, or remote control, of defense vehicles possible in virtual reality. The funding, allocated to the center in the fiscal year 2005 Defense Appropriations bill, is still pending approval from both houses of Congress.

Jim Oliver, director of the Virtual Reality Application Center, said the research for this project has been underway since last fall.

“We’ll use this funding to refurbish some of our facilities and continue what we’ve started,” he said.

Jared Knutzon, graduate student in electrical and computer engineering, wrote one of the two master’s theses that gave the research project its start. Knutzon said the type of room they are using to develop this technology is called C6 — “C” stands for cave, and “6” is the number of virtual reality interfaces in the room, which includes the floor and ceiling.

“It’s totally immersive 3-D graphics,” he said. “Right now, there are only two or three C6 rooms in the country.”

Oliver said the U.S. armed forces are very interested in further development of unmanned, remote-controlled vehicles because the kinds they have right now are hard to operate.

“These vehicles are designed for reconnaissance missions, and they’re like the remote control plane your brother flies, only bigger,” he said. “Putting a camera on a model airplane is like getting in your car in the middle of winter, scraping a small hole into the ice on your windshield and trying to drive home. There’s also a huge video lag between the user and the vehicle — you turn to much one way and have to turn back, then you’re out of control.”

Currently, Oliver said, it takes more than one person to control an unmanned vehicle.

“[The armed forces] wants one person to be able to fly a swarm of these things, and they want them armed and able to do missions. In order to accomplish that, you need a tremendous amount of work in the virtual interface,” he said.

New technology has allowed soldiers to program airplanes and ground vehicles to do what they want them to do, Oliver said, whether that is dropping bombs or taking pictures. But the best thing he said researchers can hope for is only for the vehicles to be semi-autonomous.

“In the real world, things will go wrong,” he said. “We’re working on making the human interface conducible to this kind of thing. When the human needs to get involved, how does he or she operate?”

Oliver said the center’s research involves the use of a virtual reality room that has large computer screens for walls — what he calls an “artificial world.”

“It’s like if you took a God’s eye view of a battle,” he said. “On these screens, you can see everything where all your planes are, how many there are, how far they are off the ground.”