Engineers Offer Virtual Means of Collaboration

UC Berkeley students and multinational companies alike engage in collaborative efforts that can entail endless headaches in terms of gathering necessary materials, finding common times and deciding upon agreeable locations in which to meet.

These are some of the issues mechanical engineering professor Sara McMains and her students and collaborators are hoping to address with their work in virtual reality.

McMains, a computer scientist by training, works at the junction of her two fields. She studies many aspects of computer-assisted design and computer-controlled manufacturing.

Currently she is working to understand how virtual reality can be used to help remote parties collaborate on the design process.

"In the old process everyone met in a room, but we're trying to eliminate that need to meet in a room," McMains said.

This has involved creating what she calls CHaMUE (Collaborative Haptic Mark-Up Environment). CHaMUE begins with a screen, which looks like drawing board, but displays a computer-generated image of the object in question alternating stereoscopically 120 times a second.

The user dons a pair of glasses, which not only open and close in sync with the screen, such that each eye gets 60 frames a second devoted to its point of view, but also tracks the position of the user's head, so that the image moves counter to the viewer.

All this results in the user looking at a 3-D, floating image of the object, a fender, for example. However, that's just the beginning. The setup allows the user to rotate the fender to look at it from any angle, to see the room (and colleagues) around the fender, and to put virtual post-it notes on it for the benefit of people an ocean away.

Perhaps the most significant feature, the "haptic" in CHaMUE, refers to a stylus that by a series of motors and levers allows the user to feel like the pen is drawing on the fender, with the appropriate resistance.

While the "off-the-shelf," glasses and haptic arm took some effort to set up, the software linking all these units together took the real work.

To test the utility of their creation, McMains' team has used Berkeley undergrads as guinea pigs.

For graduate student Young Shon, this was one of the biggest challenges. "To study humans is quite difficult due to the broad variety of background and perception level," Shon said.

For instance, they found that seeing in stereo made a difference in both the speed and accuracy of tracing a line on a virtual 3-D object. Likewise, changing the algorithm, which sends information to the haptic stylus to average transitions between surface angles, allowed for increased accuracy.

This research may have applications in a variety of design industries, especially in the car industry.

"The car industry is a good example because it is very distributed with design and manufacturing on different continents," McMains said.

It also helps that the project was partially funded by, and started as a collaboration with, Ford. Ford and other manufacturers have an interest in regularly redesigning their products, but not wasting years doing so.

"Designers like to design everything from scratch, but that takes time, so in order to get new products out faster (companies try) to get designers to use existing versions," McMains said. "With VR you can get all the people together, in real time."

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