A new low-cost 3-D virtual reality software program will help students in industrial engineering turn models into structures they can reach out and virtually touch.

Shana Smith, assistant professor in industrial education and technology, developed a program that allows students to upload the CAD models they create into a program that shows the model in 3-D.

Smith, along with Abhishek Seth and Jingsheng Zhang, graduate students in industrial education and technology, began developing the VR CAD Model Viewer to assist students in the visualization process of creating models.

“[With the program,] students can grab the model and rotate it and see the parts you cannot see in a flat picture,” Seth said.

Smith used the program in the Industrial Education and Technology 120 class she taught last spring. Students wore anaglyph 3-D glasses with cardboard frames and red and blue lenses to view the images projected onto a screen.

Katsuro Moriya, sophomore in industrial technology, said using the program in Smith’s class put him a step ahead of students from other schools who don’t have access to the program.

“It takes awhile to get used to the program, but once you do it is way easier to visualize the models,” Moriya said.

Seth said students create complex models they understand, but it is difficult to explain and show it to others. The visualization aspect needed to be improved.

LCD shutter glasses, a more advanced viewing device, are used in the development process of the program, but are too expensive to use in large numbers for classes.

“The glasses filter the left eye image and the right eye image so you can see depth. As long as you can separate the left and right eye views, you can perceive the 3-D image,” Smith said.

The program can also be run using a data glove device to rotate the image as if the user were holding it. In class, however, the instructor controls the images with keyboard commands and mouse movements.

Des Moines Area Community College and Iowa Central Community College have expressed interest in integrating the software into the classes they offer next year.

Smith said she hopes to make the program available to high schools in the future as well. The Des Moines Public School District has already brought students from its Central Campus to Iowa State for a demonstration of the technology.

The team of creators said the next step for the program is to make it Web-based and available to students through home computers.

“I think it’ll be nice considering the only place we could use the program was in class and [the professor] would have us look at the model and then go home and sketch it,” Moriya said.

Having access to the software from a home computer would make the sketching process easier for students, he added.

Prior to the VR CAD Model Viewer, other 3-D software programs were not used in a classroom setting due to high costs of 3-D graphics for viewing and difficulty importing CAD models from CAD software.

The creators developed a prototype with support from a Miller Fellowship Grant.

A year later, funding for the project continues with financial support from the National Science Foundation.

“This is going to be a great tool for students as undergraduates to start early with this technology since it will be used in the future,” Smith said.