ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, December 26, 1996 TAG: 9612260099
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG STAFF WRITER
Remember in the book "Where the Wild Things Are" when Max's room isn't his room anymore, but a dark jungle, with vines and trees and a boat waiting to take him to a land of rumpussing monsters?
Or in the Chronicles of Narnia when the wardrobe isn't a wardrobe, but an entrance to a strange and beautiful land?
Then it only makes sense that the CAVE - the next step in virtual reality at Virginia Tech - isn't really a cave but is anything researchers want it to be.
A giant chick embryo.
A Civil War battlefield.
A thunderstorm meteorologists can monitor without getting soggy.
"This can help people all over campus in all of the disciplines," said Ron Kriz, who is in charge of setting up this new technology in the old Rose's building at University Mall.
Of course right now Tech's CAVE, a name trademarked by the University of Illinois that stands for CAVE Automated Virtual Environment, is only half complete. The university hasn't yet acquired the equipment it needs to project images onto the walls from behind so that, when combined with mirrors and other graphic images, the CAVE will appear to have no walls at all. Or a ceiling, either, for that matter.
But a few people already are using a one-wall CAVE that has been temporarily set up in Hancock Hall.
"When the new CAVE is built, there will be speakers everywhere, like speaker surround," Andrius Benokraitis, an honors student in computer science, explained as he donned a pair of stereoscopic glasses and used a pointer to steer his way through an art gallery, the stock exchange and a cathedral in the one-wall CAVE.
By June 1, Tech will be ready to accommodate the professors who already are working on projects that can benefit from the visual insights the full CAVE provides, said Kriz, director of the Laboratory for Scientific Visual Analysis at Tech. The CAVE likely will be housed in the Rose's building until Tech's Advanced Communication and Information Technology Center is completed, in 2000.
Kriz likens the CAVE to the Holodeck on Star Trek's "Next Generation" - a room where anything can happen as long as you say: "Computer, start program."
But at Tech, it won't be used for escape. In part, the CAVE will be used by professors who want to totally immerse themselves in their work, to examine it from the inside out.
Last spring, Diana Farkas, a Tech professor who studies the behavior of materials, used a CAVE to walk into one of her computer models of a metal.
"It was like walking between atoms," she said. "I could sit in the fracture where this metal was breaking. You can get a much better idea of what a structure really is like in three dimensions."
Which should help her in her research. Farkas' work is part of an effort to design materials that will be hard, but not brittle.
"Ceramic is very hard, but it breaks," she said. "Plastic doesn't break, but it's soft. What we want is things that are really hard but won't break, combining the best of two types of properties."
This fall, Joan McLain-Kark, an interior design professor, visited the University of Illinois, armed with one of her students' projects - a layout of a restaurant - on a diskette. Through the CAVE, she was able to take a virtual tour of the restaurant.
The light and textures weren't perfect, she said, but "I had the experience of being in that restaurant."
CAVE technology uses more colors and appears more true-to-life than any other virtual environment she has been in, she said.
When she went through an office in the CAVE, she feared bumping into desks. When she saw a 3-D version of the world, "I put my hand inside the globe. I felt like I could really touch it."
McLain-Kark already is dreaming up uses for Tech's CAVE.
First on her list, if she can get the funding, is a design for a nursing home, a joint project with Karen Roberto, director of Tech's Center for Gerontology.
"What we want to do is propose a design and bring a group of senior citizens through to get their evaluation ahead of time," McLain-Kark said. "It seems a lot of people end up finding all of the problems afterward."
Experts have said such technology - though expensive - would save as much as 10 percent of the project's cost.
Of course before you can walk alongside an atom or into a restaurant, the corresponding computer programs need to be created. Professors already are using visual technology on their home computer work stations, Kriz said - McLain-Kark even teaches a 3-D studio class. And those programs can be translated for the CAVE. Professors can do 80 percent of the work at their home offices, he said.
The software is similar to what's being used today for movies. The characters in "Toy Story" and the dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park" came to life largely on computer.
Which explains why people have accused Kriz, who flits like a butterfly from computer screen to computer screen, of being something of a "Hollywood scientist."
(Actually, he is a professor in both the Department of Engineering, Science and Mechanics and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He teaches tensor theory, an abstract form of mathematics that can be more easily understood when it can be visualized. To help his students toward that end, Kriz uses colorful posters and computer images. The CAVE, of course, brings visualization to a new level.)
The CAVE has applications everyone can understand, said Kriz, who recently explained the technology to Tech President Paul Torgersen. Middle school children could visit a computer simulated Civil War battlefield.
A college professor could take a protein and pass it around to his students "like a beach ball at a football game" said Kriz, who's been in a number of CAVEs in preparation for this project.
Through the CAVEs, he has watched galaxies collide. He has been inside the ankle joint of a cow, though he has not yet explored the person-sized fruit fly sperm.
The CAVE has applications in medicine, he said: a doctor can practice a complicated surgery before actually going through with it.
There are applications in business: Companies that make huge, expensive prototypes - of cars, planes or construction equipment - could build them on the computer before making them out of steel.
Caterpillar Inc., which manufactures construction and mining equipment, began using CAVE technology almost as soon as it came out to study operator visibility in equipment.
General Motors has a CAVE on site, where researchers can try out models of car interiors and more.
"Interiors are particularly important and appropriate for the CAVE," said Randall C. Smith, staff research scientist for General Motors' Research and Development Center in Warren, Mich. "It's difficult to understand what it's like to be inside a car without a car wrapped around you."
The CAVE, he said, can give that feeling, plus it allows researchers to test visibility and placement of the instruments.
The auto industry spends billions of dollars on car models that are thrown away. Some are used for crash testing, Smith said, others are prototypes that don't make it. "You could easily spend hundreds or thousands on full-sized mockups of different kinds," he said, so it doesn't take long for the CAVE to earn its keep. The technology still needs a little refining, he said, but at GM, the CAVE has moved out of the lab and into use by various departments.
Kriz expects regional companies to see uses in the CAVE, too, and that could mean business for the university.
The CAVE at Tech is being set up for around $1 million - that's with discounts from a lot of the equipment manufacturers. Tech is a partner in this venture with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the institute that designed Mosaic, a browser many people use to surf the World Wide Web. A grant from the National Science Foundation for more than $800,000 is covering most of the project; the university is handling the rest.
Part of the reason Tech is getting the foundation grant is for its plans to study how real people use these virtual environments.
"People are building this gee-whiz stuff without a clue as to whether it's any good or not," said Deborah Hix, a research scientist in Tech's Computer Science Department. "There are often assumptions that just because something's new, it's better. That's not necessarily the case."
Her goal, she said, is to determine "how to best exploit this technology for humans."
HOW IT WORKS
The first CAVE man was Tom DeFanti, a University of Illinois professor who introduced the technology in 1991.
His students have gone on to set up their own CAVEs, and though there are only a few known in the country now, many people are working on new ones, said Virginia Tech's Deborah Hix.
The CAVE is set up with mirrors and high-resolution graphic images that are projected onto the walls from behind.
People who enter the CAVE wear special stereoscopic glasses as they walk through the CAVE. The glasses allow them to see things in 3D; a location sensor adjusts the boundaries, giving the person the proper perspective.
"You can walk into a chick embryo and make it as big as you want," said Tech's Ron Kriz. "You can walk into body parts and get really grossed out if you want to."
The main side effect of virtual living? "Vertigo," Kriz said.
The visuals make the body feel like it's supposed to be climbing stairs or mountains, but the real environment remains level.
The CAVE's dimensions are actually 10 feet by 10 feet by 10 feet - though it can seem to reach out to the horizon.
Kriz said that when he was in a CAVE-simulated storm, for instance, he could see the clouds approaching from the distance.
LENGTH: Long : 177 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. ALAN KIM/Staff. Ron Kriz watchs as student Andriusby CNBBenokraitis tours a virtual gallery with the aid of
three-dimensional goggles and a tether that maintains his visual
orientation with the computer. 2. NCSA/UIUC. NCSA Senior Research
Programmer Rachael Brady traces the outline of a chicken embryo in a
CAVE session at the University of Illinois. color. 3. (headshot)
Deborah Hix.