Videoconferencing is an effective method for extending the meeting-room environment, but once the talk is over, participants have had to leave the virtual table to pick up the tools of their trade and get down to business. That's where MuSE Technologies' Continuum collaborative virtual reality system comes into play.
"Despite how high-tech it is, our technology is designed around the way the mind absorbs and processes information," said Dr. Creve Maples, president and CTO of MuSE Technologies and former head of Sandia National Laboratories' Synthetic Environment Lab, who demonstrated Continuum at this week's Siggraph conference in Los Angeles.
Continuum enables multiple users based around the globe to work together over a network in a shared, real-time 3-D world with their own tools and data at their virtual fingertips. Each user navigates inside their own private "craft" and can glance at side windows of personal information - databases, Unix shells, CAD models, prior test data, or Web sites - while working in the shared space or their own "alternate" version of the virtual world away from the group.
No stranger to other worlds, the Jet Propulsion Lab, managed by the California Institute of Technology for NASA, is the first customer of an approximately US$130,000 top-of-the-line Continuum system. Last year, NASA took a shine to MuSE's first product, the Multidimensional User-oriented Synthetic Environment software shell, after using it for a real-time rehearsal of the Stardust Spacecraft's sample-gathering encounter with the Wild-2 comet, scheduled for 2004.
JPL will use Continuum to collaboratively simulate and evaluate emergent landing and micropropulsion technologies and simulate missions at the conceptual design stage in a VR world called the Integrated Spacecraft Design Environment. With Continuum as the conduit, NASA scientists from the JPL, Ames, and Langley research facilities can work together on projects like the Mars Surveyor '98 precision lander.
"Continuum will enable us to simulate our missions with even higher fidelity," said John Peterson, manager of Integrated Design Systems at JPL. "For example, you could put a texture map on the computer model of the lander that changes color with heat and observe that in the simulation."
Maples has no shortage of potential uses for his technology either. Engineers, he says, might meet inside a problematic electromechanical model, work on separate solutions, and teleport into each other's worlds to discuss their results; or top brain surgeons may fly together through an MRI brain scan to discuss the removal of a tumor.
"Our senses have had millions of years to evolve," Maples said. "We should definitely be using them."
