Contact: Bob Ratliff
Even at land-locked Mississippi State University, there's a quiet cove where researchers explore the ocean depths, sail above the clouds or travel in between.
This COVE is an acronym for computerized virtual environment. Surrounding all who enter with a comprehensive array of artificially generated sights and sounds, it is located at MSU's National Science Foundation/Engineering Research Center in the Mississippi Research and Technology Park.
"The COVE is a room-size virtual environment that has three rear-projected sidewalls and a floor that is top-down projected," said Robert J. Moorhead, the ERC's scientific visualization thrust leader. "The design allows a user to be immersed in an environment, see what's going on and try to understand it."
The COVE is the second generation of a design that was originally known as CAVE(. Developed at the University of Illinois at Chicago, CAVE was a multi-person "virtual reality theater" for scientific research.
MSU's scientific sanctum, which contains a number of highly advanced features, is funded, in part, by an NSF Foundation grant. The room-size area is being used to improve the ways industry designs and tests heavy equipment.
"We will be offering our services to Mississippi's farm equipment manufacturers and to the shipbuilding industry on the Gulf Coast," Moorhead said, noting that similar facilities already are operating in two Midwestern states.
"Our colleagues at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications are using a CAVE-like facility to research designs for the Caterpillar Corp.," he said. "Iowa State is doing the same in partnership with John Deere."
An associate professor of computer and electrical engineering, Moorhead said ERC's virtual environment allows researchers to change design factors more easily and to collect more performance data than they could in real-world trials with constructed models.
"For example, we can change the shape of a ship's hull and see how it changes the way the vessel maneuvers and the wake it produces," he explained. "The key is to have sufficient computer power to support the COVE."
MSU's engineering research center is recognized as one of the top 500 supercomputer sites in the world. Moorhead said its COVE is one of only about two dozen similar virtual environments in the nation and the only one in the Southeast.