AMES, Iowa -- You're high above the desert peaks. Your aircraft are approaching their targets. Information from instruments, cameras and radar is before your eyes. And with the help of 100 million pixels of bright and vivid virtual reality you're in control of a swarm of U.S. Air Force unmanned aerial vehicles.
That virtual battlespace will be just one of the applications you could experience when Iowa State University's Virtual Reality Applications Center unveils its improved virtual reality room. The (April 26) demonstrations will show off the room's new abilities to produce virtual reality at the world's highest resolution.
Iowa State's C6 opened in June 2000 as the country's first six-sided virtual reality room designed to immerse users in images and sound. The graphics and projection technology that made such immersion possible hadn't been updated since the C6 opened.
(James Oliver, the director of Iowa State's Virtual Reality Applications Center and a professor of mechanical engineering)...is leading the research team that's using C6 to develop a control interface for the military's next generation of unmanned aerial vehicles. The researchers are building a virtual environment that allows operators to see the vehicles, the surrounding airspace, the terrain they're flying over as well as information from instruments, cameras, radar and weapons systems. The system would allow a single operator to control many vehicles.
The C6 upgrade will move that project forward, Oliver said.
press release IAState news
Posted by Stubbornson at March 27, 2007 03:54 PM