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Virtual Reality, Real Research

Posted on: Monday, 8 May 2006, 06:04 CDT

By Catherine Clabby, The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C.

May 8--Gil Bohrer never leaves the room, but simply by donning special glasses, he steps into a virtual forest where a stand of oak trees floats before him. With a tap on a computer screen, Bohrer can tilt those trees to gaze upon their green canopy or to peek through their trunks. In his landscape, he depicts air currents as lumbering, colored blobs. Chubby red ones, representing warm and rising air, snake over treetops.

The illusion creates an image of what's invisible in nature, helping Bohrer, a Ph.D. engineering student in the Duke Immersive Virtual Environment, get a deeper understanding of how the wind disperses seeds in forests.

Move over Disney World and Universal Studios. Virtual reality isn't just for fun and games. At research universities, it's emerging as a new tool to depict a complicated world. Scientists are still innovating to make the most of it.

In Durham, the action happens in a new, high-tech box known as the DIVE -- a room with as many views as can be imagined. In a space as big as a freight elevator, projectors flash images on all four walls, the floor and ceiling.

A tracking system adjusts those pictures depending on where a viewer stands, giving the feeling of walking on real terrain. Users wear glasses with lenses that alternately lighten and darken -- faster than a human can see. That delivers the illusion of depth.

The DIVE is only the seventh of its kind in the world and the third in the United States, all modeled after technology pioneered at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It's new enough that precisely how it will be most useful is anybody's guess, said Rachel Brady, director of Duke's Visualization Technology Group.

"It's where you meet people trying to make something new work," Brady said.

Users enter the DIVE, located in a Pratt School of Engineering building, wearing giant felt slippers to protect the screen that doubles as a floor. Once computers and projectors get fired up, and those glasses are in place, all sides of the box seem to disappear.

In one scenario, long wooden paths resembling bowling lanes appear to stretch far into the distance in four directions. In time, giant purple balls bounce toward the center. A specially designed paddle lets a person standing inside DIVE swat the balls away. To a newcomer, that's fun, like playing racquetball without a cut-throat opponent.

But the approach has research potential, too, said David Zielinski, DIVE's virtual reality programmer. One day, it will be used to safely test the reaction times of people who have suffered from Parkinson's disease, a stroke or other disorders that impair movement, he said.

Brady expects researchers to use DIVE to create therapeutic environments. In them, people with phobias of flying or encountering spiders could learn to face what threatens them, using harmless pictures rather than reality. Or recovering drug addicts could wander in settings they associate with getting high, but stay sober.

Work once done only in laboratories could be pursued here. Already, one researcher uses the facility to visualize the true shape of proteins, those molecules so critical to life on a tiny scale. Their shapes influence their functions.

Bohrer, the Ph.D. student who creates virtual woodland, is using the DIVE to hunt for what happens in nature. He starts with thousands of precise measurements taken from Duke Forest just down the road. A computer program translates those numbers into pictures. Projectors and glasses translate the images into three dimensions.

By watching the air currents, Bohrer is finding patterns. The strength of the winds over shorter trees seems more powerful than that over higher trees, something Bohrer wants to verify with observations in real forests.

"Our brains are very good at pattern recognition. If you see it, you can spot it. It can take a long time to tease things out of numbers," Bohrer said.

The patterns he is observing have implications for the dispersal of seeds and pollen in a forest.

Understanding both holds real-world applications. It could give clues to which trees have a stronger chance of getting their seeds above a canopy and carried to open ground in a given forest. And it could help define at what distances genetically modified trees need to be planted from wild trees to prevent undesired interbreeding.

"That's what science should do, find the facts," Bohrer said.

The question is: How many of those facts will be discovered in make-believe worlds?

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Copyright (c) 2006, The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C.

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Source: The News & Observer

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