Computer Graphics World

February 2009 30 n n n n Visualization tion centers because every company's goals and problems are unique. "Yes, we do a lot of work with companies that use our cen- ters, but we do a lot of work helping com- panies build their own systems," she says. Getting a Closer Look Jeff Brum, vice president of marketing at Mechdyne, contends that the usefulness of a visualization center is closely related to its convenience. He believes that a system of centralized visualization centers is not as practical in the US because the country is so vast, and as a result, traveling to an outside visualization center doesn't make as much sense as it might in Europe, where railways link many cities. Also, like Cruz- Neira, he finds that every customer pres- ents a new challenge. Mechdyne has licensed the CAVE trade- mark from the University of Illinois, and its Fakespace division worked on one of the largest CAVE projects in the US: the C6 upgrade at Iowa State (an- other project in which Cruz- Neira played an active part), completed in 2007. Mechdyne and Fakespace upgraded the university's older system based on CRT projection that had a total resolution of 6.3 mil- lion pixels. e upgrade put 24 Sony 4k digital projectors pumping out resolutions of 4096x2160 to work. A cluster of 49 HP xw9300 workstations with dual processors and dual GPUs are driving the graphics. It's the first system of its kind to support wireless tracking, and it is capable of presenting 100 million pixels. at little "redo" is reported to have cost Iowa State $4 million. e C6 is being put to work on a variety of jobs for groups within the university and also for outside contractors. For in- stance, the US Navy is using the system for simulations. It renders specific topography and battle scenes, and enables control of virtual vehicles. In another application, re- searchers explore the makeup of plants on a cellular level. "You can fly into a genome and get a whole new appreciation of the biology of organisms," says Brum, who has lost none of his enthusiasm for this technology. In another project, Mechdyne has built a specialized power-wall application for paper-product company Kimberly-Clark that replicates store shelves. It has a wide front wall and side walls for creating a virtu- al environment. According to Brum, Kim- berly-Clark used to build actual shelves, exactly re-creating them from a retail chain and stocking them with actual products (or prototype packages) and competing prod- ucts. Clearly, this was not cost-effective. As Mechdyne began installing high-def- inition screens in sites and working with industrial design customers, company of- ficials were asked if the system could faith- fully represent colors and even the stitch- ing in the material. "We did a system for Ikea that uses multiple Sony 4k projectors. eir goal was to see the stitching in the seats of their furniture," says Brum. But go- ing to 4k means that the application has to be capable of displaying that resolution. "You don't want to just put in HD resolu- tion and scale it up to 4k; the application has to be cluster-compatible," Brum adds. And that's something that providers like Mech- dyne bring to the party. In fact, that ability to be cluster-compatible and to natively show resolutions up to 4k is going to become in- creasingly important on the high end. e ability to visualize materials with perfect fidelity is an increasingly important area in industrial design, and it spans car design, furniture design, shoe design, and interior design. e ability to correctly reproduce materials and fabrics is already becoming the dividing line for some com- panies bidding for projects. RTT main- tains that it first started working with car companies on this request, but is hearing from Adidas, the company's client in the shoe business, as well as from furniture de- signers and airplane designers. "It used to be enough to project tex- tures. at's no longer good enough," says (Top) Showcase lets users put digital models in realistic environments complete with reflection maps for realistic reflections. The software scales from desktop to clusters. (Bottom) Customers can go inside the Airbus CAVE to get an accurate picture of the interior of their new plane before they take delivery. Headwave's compression technology lets users, such as geologists, view enormous datasets, including well information.

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