This section was written by Associate Editor Jean Thilmany.

Masked Moves

Motion capture animation helps endow computer-generated movie characters with lifelike behavior. Now researchers at a large consumer-goods company are looking to meld motion-capture and finite element analysis techniques to get a full picture of how products like a dust mask would adhere to the human body as the wearer moved.

“Representing the positions and movements of the human face is a big challenge in designing some of our products,” said Chris Pieper, associate research fellow at Kimberly-Clark Corp. of Neenah, Wis. Although the company is known mostly for its tissues and diapers, it also manufactures dust masks worn by professionals and do-it-yourselfers.

Engineers at Kimberly-Clark are studying how best to marry FEA and motion-capture
software to study how the company’s Professional Duckbill dust mask will best adhere
to a wearer’s face.

Pieper and his team confronted the design challenge of making a comfortable mask that at the same time maintains an airtight seal against the changing shape of the face. One part of that design process is determining how to model what he calls living surfaces—complex, moving surfaces not easily described mathematically.

To represent a moving deformable surface—a face—in contact with a flexible object—a dust mask—Pieper and his engineering team recently looked at how to borrow the motion-capture technique from the movie industry and use it to help develop the company’s Professional Duckbill dust mask.

The process of creating a moving facial model began when Pieper and his team extracted surface point position data from a low-resolution sample of facial motion capture data provided by Mova LLC of Palo Alto, Calif., which makes performance capture technology. The team next called upon Abaqus finite element analysis software from Simulia of Providence, R.I., a Dassault Systèmes brand. The FEA software was able to analyze how the face and a virtual rendition of the dusk mask would interact, even as the face changed.

“We look to these simulations to help us narrow the field of design possibilities so that when we do testing with human subjects, we’re only looking at the design finalists,” Pieper said. “That can really shrink the product design cycle.” 

“This type of product evaluation is extremely difficult using real human subjects and physical measurements,” he added. “You rarely get this high level of control outside of a simulation.”

SOCIAL GAMING

Violent video games can make for aggressive children. Now, a new study suggests that the inverse is also true: Children who play nonviolent video games are often helpful and cooperative.

Psychologists at Iowa State University in Ames had previously found that violent video games can teach children to be aggressive and can produce increasingly aggressive behavior over time. The same team of psychologists has recently examined whether some nonviolent video games could teach kids to be more cooperative and helpful.

The study looked at young people ranging from fifth-graders to college students who participated in what the researchers termed prosocial video games—positive games in which characters help others. The students who played prosocial video games also behaved in a more prosocial manner, said Douglas Gentile, an ISU assistant professor of psychology. He led a team of 12 researchers who studied students in three countries.

“Video games are not inherently good or bad,” Gentile said. “Video games can have both positive and negative effects.

“Content matters, and games are excellent teachers,” he added. “Violent content in video games can lead people to behave more aggressively. Prosocial content, in contrast, can lead people to behave in a more cooperative and helpful manner.”

DARK ENERGY

A device that astrophysicists plan to use on a deep space survey shares some features with the home-use digital camera. But while a point-and-shoot model might be perfect for capturing Christmas memories, the team led by researchers from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., is trying to probe the mysterious energy that makes up three quarters of the universe.

The Dark Energy Survey is an optical imaging survey slated to begin in the fall of 2010 and continue for five years, said Josh Frieman, a member of the Fermilab’s Theoretical Astrophysics Group. He’s also a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago.

The survey will precisely measure dark energy levels, Frieman said. While still hypothetical, dark energy is the most popular explanation scientists have to understand recent findings that the universe seems to be expanding at an accelerating rate, he said. According to the theory, dark energy permeates all of space and increases the rate of expansion of the universe.

In today’s standard model of cosmology, dark energy accounts for 74 percent of the total mass-energy of the universe, Frieman said. Ordinary matter, the familiar stuff that people and stars are made of, accounts for just 4 percent of the universe.

Researchers are calling on finite element analysis techniques to
help develop a precision camera that will accurately measure dark
energy levels. The presence of dark energy would explain why the
universe seems to be expanding.

Fermilab researchers are now at work on the camera that will be used to collect optical images for study, Frieman said. The camera will be coupled with a telescope to allow for a survey of 15 percent of the sky to light levels that are faint enough to measure the colors of galaxies at so-called redshift one. The redshift of an astronomical object generally increases with distance, which corresponds to a longer look back in time, Frieman said.

By surveying the sky out to redshift one, the dark energy measurements returned can estimate the expansion rate of the universe as it has evolved over two-thirds of its total lifetime, Frieman said. (The universe is believed to be about 13.7 billion years old.)

The camera will be one of the largest cameras to use charge-coupled devices, the same imaging devices used in digital cameras, Frieman said. The 500-megapixel device is sensitive enough to capture images in 17 seconds. The cage containing the camera will be mounted on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in north-central Chile.

The dark energy camera requires that the lenses and charge-coupled devices be precisely aligned with the primary mirror of the telescope. The researchers are calling upon finite element analysis techniques to help achieve that precision.

The research team created an alignment budget that allocates a small amount of allowable misalignment for each subsystem in the camera. The Fermilab team called upon FEA software to evaluate where each subsystem stood with regard to the alignment budget, said Ingrid Fang, a Fermilab mechanical engineer assigned to the project.

The team is using software from Ansys Inc. of Canonsburg, Pa., to ensure it meets its alignment goals as the design progresses.

Funding for the Dark Energy Survey is being provided by the a number of organizations, including the United States Department of Energy, the United States National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England.

PROGRAMMERS NEEDED

Many recent science and engineering advances have come thanks in part to ever more powerful computer simulations. A new study suggests that most advanced supercomputers require programming skills that far too few researchers in the United States possess. At the same time, affordable computers and committed national programs outside the U.S. are eroding American competitiveness in number of simulation-driven fields, meaning the United States might lose its edge in a number of fields where it currently leads research such as disease treatment and surgery.

That’s the conclusion of the World Technology Evaluation Center of Arlington, Va. In April, the center, which assesses technology worldwide, released a report called International Assessment of Research and Development in Simulation-Based Engineering and Science.

“The startling news was how quickly our assumptions have to change,” said Phillip Westmoreland, program director for combustion, fire, and plasma systems at the National Science Foundation, a U.S. federal agency. He’s one of the sponsors of the report.

“Because computer chip speeds aren’t increasing, hundreds and thousands of chips are being ganged together, each one with many processors. New ways of programming are necessary,” he said. But the U.S. lags in producing programmers with skills necessary to program these supercomputers, he said.

“Some of the new high-powered computers are as common as gaming computers, so key breakthroughs and leadership could come from anywhere in the world,” he added.

IN THE CLOUDS

Cloud computing will handle more of the heavy computational lifting called for by the scientific and engineering sectors, say researchers at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.

Definitions vary, but cloud computing is essentially a form of distributed computing that offers the capability to tap into a vast network of computing resources through the Internet, said Kate Keahey. She heads the cloud-computing infrastructure called Nimbus, which recently went online at Argonne.

When computer users are said to be operating “in the cloud” they’re actually running simulations and other computer work on custom-crafted virtual computers that exist on distributed computing platforms, Keahey said.

Researchers who sought to analyze traffic patterns on the nation’s highways, for example, could upload their data in the cloud and then have multiple computers crunch the data. The computers would then present the results back to the researchers as if a single machine had completed the work, Keahey said.

Though cloud computing evolved from grid computing, it does differ from that computational method, she added. With grid computing, researchers submit the work they want computed to a batch scheduler, which puts the job in a queue for a specific set of computing resources—for example a supercomputer—to work on.

“This means you have no control over when your job might execute,” Keahey said. “You’re pretty much at the mercy of how that particular grid asset is set up. If its configuration doesn’t quite match the complexities of your job, fixing the problem may get very complicated.”

Many cloud-computing platforms tell users ahead of time how much computing capacity is available from the cloud so the work can be done faster, she said. Users can also configure a virtual machine within the cloud to meet the particulars of the jobs they’re trying to accomplish, Keahey said.

After users have configured the type of virtual machine they need for their work they can go to different cloud computing providers and recreate the system they need to get their jobs done, she added.

Keahey and her team developed the Nimbus open-source cloud-computing infrastructure to allow scientists working on data-intensive research projects to use such virtual machines with a cloud provider.

BRIEFLY NOTED

Spatial Corp. of Broomfield, Colo., has released its Rapid Application Development Framework to accelerate 3-D application development. /// Excitech of Enfield, England, has launched its Autodesk Videos on Demand CDs and videos, which cover upgrades and new features in the recently released 2010 portfolio of CAD products from Autodesk of San Rafael, Calif. /// Coade of Houston has released a 64-bit version of its CADWorx Plant Design Suite 2009 for platforms running a 64-bit version of AutoCAD. /// Autodsys Inc. of Portland, Ore., has released AcceliCAD 2010, an upgrade to its general purpose CAD program, which also serves as a platform for vertical applications. /// Ghost 3D of San Francisco has released the 2010 versions of its 3-D modeling, digitizing, 3-D manipulation, animation, visualization, and reverse engineering products. /// A maker of software that creates 3-D models from scan data, Geomagic of Research Triangle Park, N.C., has released Geomagic Studio 11, featuring a parametric exchange capability that establishes a connection between the scanning and the CAD processes. /// The recently released SpaceClaim 2009 Service Pack 1 from SpaceClaim of Concord, Mass., includes a number of enhancements, including new tools, interface options, and translators. /// NVIDIA of Santa Clara, Calif., has released version 2.2 of the CUDA Toolkit and SDK for GPU computing.  /// Cobham Technical Services of Dorset, England, has released an upgrade to its Vector Fields software tool used to help design rotating electrical machinery.  /// Centric Software Inc., of Campbell, Calif., has launched the Centric Connector for Adobe Creative Suite, part of the Centric 8 product lifecycle management and sourcing suite. It integrates design sketches and files with product design, supplier, and manufacturing information.