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."

UB President William R. Greiner said "NYSCEDII will provide the highest-end visualization capabilities and expertise that exist anywhere today. A world-class center in product design and industrial innovation, NYSCEDII will serve as a central resource for regional industries and for businesses throughout the state, enabling them to exponentially increase their competitive advantage, especially at the global level.

"We believe NYSCEDII is a major asset not only for UB and the Buffalo-Niagara region, but for all of New York State. We are very grateful to the governor, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Assemblymen Schimminger and Tokasz, and the entire state legislature for their outstanding support for this project."

UB Provost Elizabeth D. Capaldi noted that "visualization is a key to major scientific advances because it allows understanding of data sets too complex for the mind to comprehend any other way. We are delighted to be a leader in an area of such central importance for future scientific and engineering advances."

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.

"UB's Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering has developed a very strong focus in engineering design as recognized by many grants and awards, including the prestigious CAREER awards from the National Science Foundation," said Mark Karwan, Ph.D., dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

"We are pleased that Speaker Silver has chosen this area in which to provide the infrastructure for a leading center in engineering design with a special focus on virtual reality and visualization."

During the past decade, the research efforts of Bloebaum and several other faculty members in the department 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.