A two-week-old, 10-foot cube promises to provide exciting opportunities for experts in synthetic environments.

The Spatially Immersive Display, C2, is a projection-based virtual reality system that surrounds the viewer with four screens, similar to a theater.

James Edward Bernard, ISU mechanical engineering professor and director of the Iowa Center for Emerging Manufacturing Technology (ICEMT), along with his colleagues, has helped to create the technological masterpiece.

“This has been a cooperative effort of students and faculty working together,” Bernard said. He said he wants to emphasize that many faculty and students have made contributions to this project, which they hope to showcase with an open house in late October.

C2, the latest in virtual reality, is a room that allows visitors to interact with and become immersed in a computer-generated world.

ISU researcher and immersive environment specialist Carolina Cruz-Neira created the original CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) while she was doing graduate work at the University of Illinois.

Cruz-Neira is an assistant computer science professor at ISU and an associate scientist at ICEMT. She has done a significant amount of research with immersive environments.

Researchers in the visualization laboratory come from various backgrounds, including engineering, mathematics and computer science. The team consists of 12 faculty and more than 60 students.

Bernard said virtual reality is not easy to define. “By using the term synthetic environment, scientists and engineers can encompass more than the entertainment aspects that the term virtual reality implies, but also the serious science applications.”

C2 is arranged in a cube made up of three rear-projection screens for walls and a down-projection screen for the floor. An image is reflected onto the floor by a projector that points to a mirror overhead.

“It [C2] surrounds its user with 3-Dimensional imagery, connecting them in a very direct way with their engineering and scientific applications,” Bernard said.

The C2 environment is worth well over one million dollars. Bernard said most of it was paid for by outsiders and those who are interested in making new and exciting discoveries.

The team of scientists and engineers associated with the research and manufacturing of C2 are very optimistic about its benefits. “We believe this kind of interaction will lead to breakthroughs not possible using more traditional methods,” Bernard said.

Judy Vance, ISU mechanical engineering professor and ICEMT member, has also played a key role in the C2 creation with her research in virtual engineering design.

“One major advantage of using an immersive environment over a traditional workstation-based environment is the ability it provides to the user to evaluate spatial relationships between computer-generated objects,” Vance said.

She said that some evaluations are difficult to determine by viewing the scene using a workstation monitor.

“For example, being immersed in a computer environment allows a person to get a feeling for how big a room is, how much clearance there is in a workspace, how one part of a machine operates in relationship to another part, how high the workbench seems in an assembly operation, etc.”

Chris Mende, a senior in management information systems said, “From the viewpoint of manufacturing, synthetic environments provide an incredibly fast way to create prototypes for products.”

Mende and Vance said functions such as sound and touch are still in the works.

“C2 has provided the capability to combine real structures with computer images, which fosters the development of multiple solutions to real world problems,” Vance said.

“Virtual reality allows the user to be placed into the computer environment along with the computer generated objects.”

By allowing multiple users to work together in the same virtual space, Vance said C2 invariably promotes collaboration between designers and encourages communication.

“With graphic terminals one is always outside looking in, while devices like the C2 break that paradigm by placing the designer inside with the graphics,” said ISU mechanical engineer Kurt Hoffmeister said.

Bernard continues to head the ICEMT and is currently serving as the interim director of the computation center. His main focus, however, is extensive research with his graduate students in real-time simulation and vehicle dynamics.

ICEMT was established in 1990 with a grant from the Carver Foundation. It is an interdisciplinary research center at ISU and is a member of the Institute for Physical Research and Technology at ISU.

Bernard said that his work with the ICEMT research team on the C2 and other projects in the department are “…just a part of his responsibility to serve the university.”