ONLINE PRESERVATION EFFORTS

Much of the unique Shaker architectural style has sadly been lost.

The Shakers were a religious group that built 19 communities in the United States during the 1800s, and had a prolific and distinct architectural construction and design style.

But now, a University of Cincinnati project aims to at least rebuild it online.

A project at the University of Cincinnati is reconstructing digital models of a Shaker village in Ohio. The reconstruction—based on old photos, drawings, and maps—are available for viewing online at Google 3D Warehouse. 

Architecture students, led by adjunct architecture professor Jose Kozan, have created 3-D virtual models of structures that no longer exist, but were once part of the White Water Shaker Village site near Harrison, Ohio.

The models—found online in Google’s 3-D Warehouse and Google Earth—include a virtual barn, dye house, and boys’ residence.

Those models come on the heels of a years-long project by Kozan to collect old photographs of the village as well as old drawings and maps of the area. Students relied on those documents as they worked to virtually restore the northernmost portion of the site.

“Reconstructing the lost buildings or even the lost interiors of existing buildings is a challenging puzzle,” Kozan said. “We have no surviving plans. Interiors have been dramatically altered and subdivided since the Shakers left the site in 1916. And for two buildings on the site, later owners have made additions like porches and annexes, and changes like an asphalt roof, that must be removed virtually to see the structures as the Shakers knew them.”

Kozan’s long-term goal is to expand these virtual reconstructions to include other historical Shaker communities and to encourage tourism via virtual preservation.

MAKING MAINTENANCE MANUALS

In an ever-changing industry, maintenance and repair manuals can become outdated in a hurry. Take China’s aviation industry. It has been moving rapidly of late and its technical manuals must keep up with that pace of change.

To help, Aircraft Maintenance and Engineering Corp. of Beijing recently implemented a new content management and publishing system to automatically update its maintenance, repair, and overhaul manuals, said Gan Desheng, IT manager at AMECO. The company performs maintenance and overhaul services for Western-made aircraft.

The new system, Arbortext from PTC of Needham, Mass., helps the AMECO generate and manage its large numbers of documents, manuals, and publications.

Now, when writers and editors create maintenance and repair information, they also store it in a central content management system that’s accessible to everyone responsible for creating and maintaining the manuals. Editors also can share common content among technical manuals, Gan said.

SMALL IS GOOD

Although high-tech entrepreneurs and other knowledge-based businesses are often successful, they rarely develop into large enterprises. But that’s not for lack of ambition, said Aard Groen.

In fact, many entrepreneurs feel that a large enterprise shouldn’t be their end goal, he added.

Groen is a professor of innovative entrepreneurship at the University of Twente, which is an entrepreneurial research university in Enschede, The Netherlands. Groen founded VentureLab at the school, which, he said, offers scientifically tested methods for successful high-tech start-ups.

The vast majority of the 700 or so spin-off enterprises created by the University of Twente over the last 25 years are still going strong, Groen said. Athough 80 percent are still operating five years after their conception, the average size of these companies remains between 10 and 15 employees.

That number is often considered disappointing in business and financial terms, Groen said. But the majority of those start-up entrepreneurs don’t consider the small roster of employees a problem.

They’ve discovered where their strengths lie, have developed market status, and have now secured a stable position.

“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that,” Groen said. “This has nothing to do with a lack of ambition, but more to do with the fact that growth is not their primary objective.”

SECOND-TIME DESIGN

Recreating a part can present its own challenges. Take Sonnax of Bellows Falls, Vt., for example. It manufactures aftermarket auto transmission components and has standardized on 3-D CAD software to re-engineer parts, said Steve McAllister, a Sonnax technical group manager in engineering.

The engineers are more productive and more creative in their design approaches after moving to 3-D software, he added.

Sonnax makes replacement components for automatic transmissions, torque converters, driveshafts, and related products for the passenger vehicle, racing, and heavy-duty vehicle markets. Its parts are used in rebuilt transmissions, which often carry 100,000-mile warranties.

Engineers now use SolidWorks software from SolidWorks of Concord, Mass.

“We get worn-out parts that we reverse-engineer to find out where the part failed,” McAllister said.
“SolidWorks lets us identify the original failure point and then design it right.”

Sonnax engineers need to study every design aspect of a city bus driveshaft, for example, to make sure that the replacement part will last. The 3-D software makes this close-up look possible, he added.

HOW REAL?

Companies aiming to keep costs down are looking to virtual worlds to train employees and help them collaborate more effectively. But if they’re not feeling part of the world, employees are not going to communicate well.

So just how real do those worlds feel?

A new ranking scale measures how real virtual worlds like Second Life feel to users.

A North Carolina State University professor has led development of a scale that measures how fully employees feel part of their virtual world. An increased sense of presence in the virtual world leads to better information comprehension and retention, said Mitzi Montoya, a professor of marketing at the university. She worked with Anne Massey, a professor of information systems at Indiana University in Bloomington, to develop the scale.

The feedback that companies get about how fully employees are invested in their virtual worlds help those firms as they develop virtual-world training and collaboration methods, Montoya said.

“We believe that if users feel they are present in the virtual world, they will collaborate better with other members of their team and the more effective the virtual world will be as a setting for research and development,” she said.

The scale, called Perceived Virtual Presence, measures how well users interact with the virtual environment, with their work in that environment, and with others. Essentially, the PVP scale can help design a virtual environment that has the degree of reality that will best cater to a company’s specific needs.

“The scale can determine what PVP levels are most conducive to training, collaboration, or other applications,” Montoya said.

BUILD A SUPERCOMPUTER

Want to try your hand at designing and operating a research supercomputer? Give a whirl to a new online game developed at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.

“Supercomputing is not the most accessible of topics. It can be difficult to understand,” said Kyle Bowen, informatics manager for information technology at Purdue, who helped develop the game, called Rack-A-Node.

Purdue University has created a game to teach users how to build and operate a supercomputer. Rack-A-Node players design a supercomputer and then try to keep it running as science jobs are submitted.

Players build a cluster supercomputer using a variety of computing types to run science experiments. A player begins with a small supercomputer and receives science jobs to process. If these jobs are successful, the player receives funding needed to build an even bigger supercomputer.

The player must optimize the supercomputer to deal with waves of science jobs submitted, Bowen said.
For example, the game begins with a chemistry job that requires a lot of memory, and proceeds to a climate-modeling job, which is a high-throughput task that needs faster network communication. Later, a 3-D science animation-rendering job requires multiple nodes to process.

The game also includes jobs from life sciences, pharmacy, physics, and engineering, Bowen said.
The online game can be found at http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/rackanode/.

UNDER THE HOOD

Renault engineers used to spend a lot of time integrating cooling and air conditioning devices to fit a vehicle’s design, said Sébastien Bremont, a thermal simulation manager at the French automaker.

First, engineers created many physical mock-ups of the integrated systems. Next came several days of wind tunnel testing.

But Renault recently decided to rely more on computerized simulation when it comes to engineering the underhood thermal environment. To that end, the automaker deployed a collaborative-system simulation application, which has helped reduce the number of physical prototypes by 50 percent, Bremont said.

Engineers use the AMESim system from LMS of Leuven, Belgium, to simulate thermo-fluid combined systems, including the refrigerant systems, cooling systems, and air systems, Bremont said. The software lets engineers model various scenarios that involve air-entry geometries in various operating modes, such as fan and air conditioning on or off modes.

A GUARANTEED SEAT

As airports become stretched to capacity, a computer scientist in Greece has designed a system that he says can ensure as many seats as possible are filled on each flight and no one is left stranded at check-in.

In recent years, the airline industry has become increasingly dependent on computers for operations and strategic management, said Dimitris Kanellopoulos, a professor of electrical engineering and computer technology at the Technological Educational Institute of Patras.

But the current software the industry uses to assign passengers to available seats is outmoded and inefficient, he said. One of the main problems is that the software doesn’t understand the passengers’ requirements, he said.

Inspired by earlier work on an employer-employee matching system developed by researchers in Spain, Kanellopoulos is working on an intelligent Web portal that will act as a service provider for the airline industry.

Kanellopoulos said his work extends recent developments in Web searching that allows travelers to find seats on different airlines and to hook up their flight to car rental, hotel reservation, vacation packages, and other travel products.

The portal would help Europeans find airline seats that match their personal traveling preferences by locking onto keywords they use to describe themselves and their travel needs. For instance, passengers might specify that they require a shorter-than-standard check-in time, or wheelchair access, or that they’ll be using frequent-flyer rewards. They can also cite such things as a preference for a no-frills carrier.

This kind of semantic information would then be matched against a knowledge database provided by the airlines that represents all the possible options available in terms of time of flights, seating, eating, and check-in arrangements, and other variables, Kanellopoulos said.

The knowledge database works with a special conceptual model known as airlines ontology. The model endows the Web portal with an understanding of what each passenger requires.

BRIEFLY NOTED

CD-adapco of New York has released Star-CCM+ version 3.06, an upgrade to its multiphysics engineering simulation software. /// Dosch 3D of Marktheidenfeld, Germany, has released Robots 3D, which contains 20 detailed 3-D models of industrial and science-fiction robots. The models are useful for animation, illustration, and design. /// Delcam of Birmingham, England, will soon launch an upgrade to its CopyCAD reverse engineering package. CopyCAD Pro will add triangle modeling to the combination of surface and solid modeling usually sold as hybrid modeling, according to the developer. /// ASGvis of Baltimore is shipping release 1.5 for both its V-Ray for Rhino 4 and its V-Ray for Sketchup 6 applications. This release offers expanded render channels and extra light options, and addresses several bug fixes. /// Nemetschek North America of Columbia, Md., announced that a number of its European distributors have released localized 2009 versions of its Vectorworks line of design software, including Designer, Architect, Landmark, Spotlight, Machine Design, Fundamentals, and Renderworks. /// The CAD maker Autodesk of San Rafael, Calif., has released AutoCAD LT 2009 update 2.01 /// A supplier of 3-D laser scanners, Laser Design Inc. of Minneapolis, announced that I++ compatible coordinate measuring machine motion controllers are now supported on its laser scanning systems. /// 3Dconnexion of Fremont, Calif., a Logitech company, announced that its line of 3-D mice is supported by SolidWorks 2009. /// From Planit of Southfield, Mich., comes the latest release of its EdgeCAM computer-aided manufacturing software, EdgeCAM 2009 revision 1. /// Computational Engineering International, or CEI, of Apex, N.C., has released EnSight 9, the latest version of the company’s visualization software. /// Elmo Solutions of Quebec City, which makes CAD-ERP data integration hardware and software, has released Agni Link 2009, a live, bidirectional CAD-ERP connector for SolidWorks and Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Dynamics AX, and other enterprise resource management applications. /// Ghost 3D of San Francisco has released Scribe-iT DCC for Autodesk Maya 2009. The software integrates 3-D coordinate measuring machines, such as FaroArm and MicroScribe, with 3-D applications.