Virtual Reality Center at UB Offers New York Companies Competitive Edge in Design of New Products

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The University at Buffalo has established a major center for scientific visualization and virtual reality designed to provide companies throughout New York State with a significant competitive advantage in high-tech product development.

The New York State Center for Engineering Design and Industrial Innovation (NYSCEDII, pronounced Nice-ity) is the only engineering design research center in the state that utilizes virtual reality (VR) and scientific visualization.

Its goal is to partner with industry, conduct leading-edge research on complex engineering design and train current and future employees in the emerging technologies that will govern the design and manufacture of products in the 21st century.

Funded by an initial $2.5 million from New York State and created through the support of New York State Assembly sponsors Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Assemblyman Robin Schimminger and Assemblyman Paul Tokasz and other Western New York legislators, NYSCEDII is one of just 20 such centers in the U.S.

Expansion plans now underway and funded by anticipated further support from the New York State Assembly will make the center one of the top five in the nation by 2003.

SGI, Inc., SUN Microsystems, Praxair, and Moog and other companies have provided major support in the form of equipment, services and donations.

The Assembly also funded the establishment of UB's Chair for Competitive Product and Process Design, to which Christina Bloebaum, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and NYSCEDII director, has been appointed.

"Visualization and VR help design engineers do more in less time," said Bloebaum.

"But because of the major expense of the hardware and the infrastructure that the highest-end visualization capabilities require, only the Fords and the Boeings of the world can afford to invest in this technology on their own," she said.

"The small and medium-sized companies are totally shut out. The purpose of NYSCEDII is to serve these companies, as well as larger corporations that also do not have access to such facilities, conduct research that further exploits these technologies, and train current and future employees in using these cutting-edge tools."

Focused on providing industry expertise and facilities to enable engineers to design, develop and improve products and systems more efficiently, NYSCEDII will serve the broadest range of New York State industries in sectors ranging from automotive and aerospace design to pharmaceuticals to immersive entertainment experiences.

It is seen as a major asset that will leverage existing computational and engineering strengths at UB and in industries in Western New York, southern Ontario and throughout the state, leading to significant economic development and growth through retention and creation of jobs, strengthening of existing companies, spinoffs of new ones and the training of current and future employees.

Companies working with NYSCEDII will benefit from visualization, simulation and Web-based collaborative multidisciplinary design, all of which are areas pioneered by researchers in UB's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

During the past decade, the research efforts of Bloebaum and several other faculty members in the UB Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering have established UB as a leader in the field of multidisciplinary design and optimization, which is dedicated to optimizing the design and performance of complex systems, whether they are cars, airplanes or power plants. Such systems involve multiple disciplines, such as structures, control and aerodynamics.

Some of NYSCEDII's capabilities include:

o Rapid, virtual prototyping, allowing companies and researchers to explore a design's many possibilities in a fraction of the time it would take to build a real prototype and at a fraction of the cost

o Computer-aided design, which allows engineers to design prototypes on computers, and 3D modeling

o Sensory and Haptic (touch and feel) VR capabilities, which allow participants to directly interact with simulations using specialized equipment, such as data gloves and goggles

o Complex, real-time simulations

o Animation

o Immersive and high-end visualization for VR

NYSCEDII has a WorkWall allowing access to life-sized, immersive simulations and allows large groups of engineers or designers to work in three dimensions collaboratively. It generally is suited to looking at design reviews of completed products or parts of models.

By the end of this year, the center will have a four-wall immersive environment that will take participants one step closer to simulating the real world with images projected on screens on three walls and the floor. Within the next three years, NYSCEDII will have a six-wall immersive environment, where an entire room becomes the design, allowing participants a unique "inside looking out" view, currently the highest level of immersion available in the world.

According to Bloebaum, industries now investing in visualization and VR include automotive design (she cites an investment of approximately $40 million by GM), aircraft design, manufacturing, entertainment, and oil and gas exploration. The latter reports that using VR has boosted its "hit" rate of finding usable energy reserves from 50 percent to better than 70 percent.

NYSCEDII already has entered into projects with industrial partners including Praxair, Veridian, Moog, SGI, Inc., SUN Microsystems, Fakespace Systems and Mechdyne.

The purpose of visualization in all of these, she explained, is to compress the vast amounts of data now being generated by high-performance computers into an easy-to-use, visual format. VR provides the ability to generate an immersive, virtual environment of a product or a place or an entity, whether it be a biological molecule or a spaceship, through which participants can "walk" or "fly."

"Designers and analysts in all kinds of fields are recognizing that visualization provides an intuitive way to explore all the data that now are being generated by computer analyses," explained Bloebaum.

What sets NYSCEDII apart from other centers that specialize in these two technologies is its ability to team up with its neighbor at UB, the Center for Computational Research.

"The coupling of NYSCEDII with CCR brings to UB and our partners something quite unique, that is, the ability to generate real-time simulations that we couldn't do otherwise," she said.

While all visualization technologies are powered by supercomputers, such hardware is specifically customized for visualization; the infrastructure at CCR provides additional power designed for high-performance computations.

For example, one project now underway by UB geologists and engineers using NYSCEDII and CCR facilities is the real-time simulation and visualization of volcanic eruptions.

The group is proposing that by taking real-time data of volcanoes from satellite images and constructing them into three-dimensional models, they can perform complex analyses on CCR's machines, which then can be visualized in real-time using NYSCEDII's immersive environment infrastructure.

It is expected that that capability will allow UB's volcanologists to do the analyses required in real-time to determine whether or not a population near an active volcano will need to evacuate or not.

Other projects now underway using NYSCEDII include:

o virtual model of a hospital emergency room, as part of a project to determine how quake-induced fractures in walls would affect an ER's ability to function during and after an earthquake

o development of GIVE, Geographic Independent Virtual Environment, allowing designers in various geographic locations to work together on 3D designs using the Web

o interactive simulations coupled with motion for applications for location-based entertainment (such as Universal Studios' Spiderman ride, for which Moog provides the motion base) and industrial applications

o Coldbox layout, sponsored by Praxair, in which optimization and visualization techniques were used to find an optimal layout for an air separation plant cold box

Bloebaum emphasized that it is not just the hardware that is necessary to do advanced simulations and collaborative design, but an experienced staff of doctoral-level professionals working together with upper-level graduate students.

"These projects are extremely labor-intensive, so just as Ford Motor Company, for example, has a staff of visualization and VR specialists that work with their design engineers, NYSCEDII also has its own professional staffmembers, each of whom has a doctorate in the field, to work with companies and academic researchers," she said.