Open Competition 1 - Information Technology

Virtual Reality Anthropomorphic Avatars for Scalable Telecollaboration Including Wireless and Other Low-Bandwidth Devices

Sponsor: Industrial Virtual Reality, Inc.

• Project Performance Period: 11/1/2001 - 10/31/2004
• Total project (est.): $2,500,000.00
• Requested ATP funds: $2,000,000.00

Providing skilled technical field support in a timely manner is a problem common to many industries. Industrial Virtual Reality (lVR) proposes a portable field service technology that can put an industrial service company's top technical experts wherever the problem is almost immediately through virtual reality "avatars". These anthropomorphic representations of technical personnel would interact with a realistic model of the factory floor, machine, or other trouble spot in VR simulations and demonstrate the steps necessary to remedy the situation. The technology faces two major hurdles: current avatars are too imprecise to accurately convey the necessary information, and detailed engineering models of products and parts require far too much data to be effectively transmitted and used over relatively low bandwidth communications such as a phone line. Today's avatars often lose continuity when moved, and they cannot be positioned accurately and smoothly enough to represent the fine motions required for demonstrating the operation of complex machinery. And while computer aided design and manufacturing systems have developed excellent capabilities to represent complex objects and their relationships, they produce huge data files and were never designed for use over a low bandwidth connection. Industrial Virtual Reality's project is to develop methods both for the precise representation of equipment parts and the position and representation of avatars necessary for the accurate depiction of manufacturing and equipment maintenance procedures even when the data must be transferred over low bandwidth channels. A small company started by two university professors to make use of recent research to practical manufacturing applications. IVR needs ATP support to pursue the technology. The University of Illinois will provide a VR testbed for the project, Controls and Automation Technology, Inc., and Caterpillar Inc. will participate in the project to provide real world data and simulation problems. The company estimates that field service calls made by virtual avatars could ultimately save U.S. industry as much $270 million annually in handling field service and remote facility service. The project is expected to lead to a middleware for various VR related software and hardware applications.

For project information:

Pat Banerjee, (312) 996-5599
banerjee@uic.edu

ATP Project Manager

Barbara Cuthill, (301) 975-3273
barbara.cuthill@nist.gov