by Dominic Corva
Daily Cougar StaffI took a virtual roller coaster ride recently over the Johnson Space Center.
I was strapped to a specially designed chair that contours the body into the position it assumes in zero gravity.
An $8,000 helmet was strapped to my head, complete with earphones and flaps to block light from entering at the corners of a heavy eyepiece.
The lights were turned off, and there I was, in a virtual roller coaster high above the virtual ground. I could hear the sound of my coaster creaking its way up steep inclines, and I could feel the press of inertia around corners and as I descended, maxing out around a modest 10 to 15 miles per hour during the two-minute ride.
When it was over, I was still in Bowen Loftin's Virtual Environment Training Laboratory at the University of Houston Business Park complex a few miles southeast of the main campus.
The ride I took was a demonstration of just one of the many technologies Loftin, a researcher and professor in the Department of Computer Science, uses to train astronauts, develop new research methods and revolutionize education.
If experience is the best teacher, then virtual research is learning at the highest level. According to Loftin, virtual learning is useful not only to astronauts and scientists, but to students as well.
Students who have trouble conceptualizing complex scientific worlds will be helped immensely by being able to interact with virtual environments, he said.
Virtual reality is an effective teaching tool, Loftin said, adding that total immersion places individuals inside the information they are learning, and that the multisensory experience increases perception because the information can be heard and felt as well as seen. Interaction makes it possible to observe information dynamically rather than passively.
Loftin puts it plainly: "Would you rather read history (or science or math) or live it?"
Because a large portion of his funding comes from NASA, the National Science Foundation and the United States Navy, most of the practical applications of Loftin's research are geared toward training methods for astronauts and the development of Project: Science Space, which so far has resulted in the creation of three virtual science "worlds."
The first world developed as part of the project was "Newton World," a corridor with rigid walls at each end and nine evenly spaced columns along the sides with lines on the floor to help gauge speed and distance. Users may watch the action from above or in the corridor, but the most interactive option is choosing to be a virtual ball and experience collisions with one of the walls or another ball.
"Maxwell World" concentrates on students' conceptualization process in the area of electromagnetic fields. In a one-meter cube, students are able to place source charges into the world, then display, observe and control electric field lines generated by those charges. This is an abstract world with experiences completely unavailable in a classroom setting or laboratory.
The last world to be developed was "Pauling World." It shrinks users to the size of an atom to study the chemical structures of molecules represented in three dimensions. Molecule components can be displayed in the traditional stick-and-ball form, a wire frame backbone with coded icons or space-filling spheres.
In "Pauling World," researchers will be able to stand among virtual viruses and the makeup of proteins and inhibitors, manipulating them to see how they fit and why.
To visit "Pauling World," one must enter what VETL researchers call the Cave, a room in the laboratory in which images are projected onto three walls and the floor. The visitor faces the front wall, puts on a pair of blocky, three-dimensional glasses and voila, he is in a world not unlike Star Trek's holodeck.
The cave technology isn't terribly convincing: The imageless ceiling is a distracting discontinuity, and there is no way to touch the molecules that swirl around the room. Special gloves with air pockets that apply varying degrees of pressure on a user's hands can be used to compensate for the latter problem.
The lab is also developing applications for use in the oil and gas industry, both in search of new supplies of hydrocarbon-based fuels and in the efficient extraction of those materials.
Loftin is working with former UH chemistry Professor Andy McCammon (now at the University of California at San Diego) on simultaneous virtual training from multiple geographical locations.
The immediate practical application of a shared virtual environment is training astronauts for an international space station project. Using telecommunications technology, astronauts in different countries will be able to interact in a shared virtual environment.
The Virtual Lab serves the university in a truly interdisciplinary fashion. UH law Professor Seth Chandler is using the technology to create economic models with more variables than normal computers can handle.
James Bliss, a researcher from the University of Alabama-Huntsville and an adjunct professor of psychology at UH, is studying the effectiveness of virtual training using students as subjects.
And UH chemistry Professor Monty Pettit has a molecular design project to experiment with in "Pauling World."
Loftin teaches a computer graphics class for the Department of Computer Science this semester. According to VETL staff member Pat Hyde, if he can turn over the reins of that class to another professor, Loftin plans to develop a class specifically devoted to virtual reality for a wide range of students.
The VETL was moved to UH property from NASA in September after NASA and the university signed the Space Act agreement, an extension of a 1958 congressional mandate that NASA must find ways to transfer applied technologies to the nation as