Looking-glass world: learning to assemble the machinery of illusion - virtual reality

Science News, Jan 4, 1992 by Ivars Peterson

Moreover, generating realistic computer graphics and simulations requires immense computing power that often must be spread over several computers. At the same time, writing and testing the software necessary for creating virtual worlds have so far proved both difficult and error-prone.

The IBM effort is still at an early, experimental stage. "We're building for three to four years from now," Lewis says.

IBM executives say they have no immediate plans for any products related to virtual reality. For now, the company has focused its efforts on developing new ways of visualizing scientific and financial data on computers.

As an instrument of scientific discovery, "the computer is more versatile than the telescope or the microscope, but what has been missing is a good eyepiece," says IBM's C.N. Liu. That's where visualization and, ultimately, virtual reality enter.

The Boeing Co. in Seattle, through its Boeing Computer Services subsidiary, has embarked on a course considerably more ambitious than that of most companies dabbling in virtual reality. Boeing executives now see virtual-reality technology as offering potential solutions to a range of problems encountered in the aircraft industry.

"We need advanced technology to change the way we do design, manufacturing, training and marketing," says Boeing scientist Chris Esposito. "We see virtual reality as a fairly obvious next step."

Boeing already uses computers extensively in the design and production of airplanes. Its new 777 aircraft, scheduled for delivery in May 1995, will be the first airliner designed and engineered entirely within a computer. The 777 program has no need for drawing boards or even blueprints of the traditional type.

By adding virtual-reality capabilities to computer-aided design, company researchers hope to avoid the kinds of maintenance problems that presently be-devil airline employees when, for instance, only a person of a certain height or arm length can tighten a particular nut or reach a defective part. Using virtual-reality technology, designers could readily find out -- while an airplane is still in the design stage -- whether a maintenance worker is likely to scrape a knuckle when replacing a part.

And there are many other situations in which virtual-reality technology may play a role, Esposito says.

As a first step, he and his co-workers developed a remarkably realistic flight simulator for Boeing's experimental VS-X tiltrotor aircraft, so that engineers could evaluate the effect of design changes on its performance. Displayed last summer in Las Vegas at the Association for Computing Machinery's SIGGRAPH '91 conference, the demonstration proved a crowd-pleaser, not just at the meeting but earlier within Boeing itself.

"It caught the attention of a lot of people in the company," Esposito says.

However, because virtual-reality technology is so new and because many questions remain concerning how to translate the massive amounts of data generated during the design of an airplane into forms suitable for a virtual environment, Boeing's team is moving slowly. "This process has to be very much a learning experience," Esposito says.