Students and faculty in the mechanical engineering department have created a rather unique way to get from the Campanile to Beardshear.

The Virtual Campus Project lets students stroll electronically around campus. It all began in the summer of 1994 “to get students introduced to what we do,” said James Oliver, professor of mechanical engineering.

Oliver said every summer officials gather a new crew of students to work in the visualization labs on a labor-intensive project.

“The Virtual Campus environment was designed as a test bed for other projects in virtual environments,” Oliver said.

In the summer of 1995 the project was to design a Virtual Factory, and this past summer’s assignment was to create a Virtual Farm.

Chris Mende, a senior in management information systems, said the Virtual Campus was sort of a “virtual prototype.”

Mende, along with computer engineering graduate student Terry Welsh, has continued working with the project since 1994.

“The main purpose of the Virtual Campus is to act as a demonstration tool. It has also helped to attract funding for the department,” Mende said.

The Virtual Campus Project proved to be a big hit with the state Board of Regents, Oliver said, when it helped regents visualize the future of the ISU campus.

“We worked with people from the architecture department on constructing a new building on campus,” Oliver said.

Using Virtual Campus, officials were able to simulate the removal of campus buildings and plot the space and construction for the new Engineering Teaching and Research Complex (ETRC).

The ETRC design includes high-tech classrooms with cable, video communications capabilities and training stations to facilitate technology transfer to industry.

One interface added recently to the Virtual Campus is the Virtual Bike, an actual bicycle that you sit on while cruising through the Campus.

The Campus has been created with all the visual aspects — building textures, colors, vegetation, sky, streets, etc. — without actual physical force calculations.

Still, there’s more to be done. “It’s still under construction. It’s huge,” Welsh said.

The creation of just one building can take weeks, depending on the size and complexity of the measurements, angles and elevation.

The lay-out of the campus is taken from topography maps to get elevation data.

Hundreds of photographs were taken of buildings, right down to every wall in the structure.

Buildings and structures are continually being added.

Portions of the Virtual Campus can be found on the World Wide Web at: http://www.icemt.-iastate.edu.