This section was written by Associate Editor Jean Thilmany.

VIRTUAL TASTE

While virtual reality technology has made great strides of late, wearing a headset and immersing oneself in a virtual environment still isn’t the same as really being there.

Now a group of English researchers is at work on a virtual reality headset that can stimulate all five senses at once to help the virtual experience feel more realistic.

“Virtual reality projects have typically only focused on one or two of the five senses—usually sight and hearing,” said David Howard, who heads the Audio Laboratory of the Intelligent Systems Research Group in the Department of Electronics at the University of York in England.

This is a concept design of a mobile Virtual Cocoon, a virtual reality device that would integrate all five senses for an enhanced real-feeling virtual reality environment.

Howard is lead scientist on an initiative called Towards Real Virtuality, which intends to make virtual reality more realistic by incorporating all five senses through the use of various devices. Researchers from a number of universities will join to develop the Virtual Cocoon, which Howard said will consist of a headset that includes specially developed electronics and computing capabilities. Tactile devices will provide the sense of touch.

The researchers want to mimic the way all five senses interact in real life, Howard said.

Smell will be generated electronically via a new technique being pioneered by Alan Chalmers and his team. Chalmers is a professor of visualization in the Warwick Digital Laboratory at the University of Warwick in Coventry, England.

“Taste and smell are closely linked, but we intend to provide a texture sensation relating to something being in the mouth,” Chalmers said.

The team also aims to develop improved computing and electronics that will make the virtual reality headset much lighter, more comfortable, and less expensive than currently available devices, Howard added.

A British government agency, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, is helping fund the Virtual Cocoon project.

DEVICES ON DEMAND

Imagine an Etch a Sketch for nanodevices.

A University of Pittsburgh team has has published a paper that describes a technique for writing nanoscale electronic devices. Devices can be erased and created anew, mimicking the Etch A Sketch drawing toy that inspired the researchers.

The method could yield advanced forms of high-density memory devices, transistors, and computer processors, said Jeremy Levy, a professor in the university’s department of physics and astronomy and one of the authors of the paper.

Essentially, the researchers have introduced a nanoscale one-stop shop that can be used to create electronics on the nearly single-nanometer scale from the same materials, he said.

Using the conducting probe of an atomic force microscope, Levy and his team created wires less than 4 nanometers wide at the interface between two insulators: a crystal of strontium titanate and a 1.2-nanometer thick layer of lanthanum aluminate. The nanowires can be erased with a reverse voltage or with light, returning the interface to its original structure.

The technique allows nanodevices to function as electronic devices that can be rewritten, allowing scientists to create devices on demand, said Evelyn Hu, a professor of applied physics and electrical engineering at Harvard University.

“To take a blank sheet and write in the electronic function is accomplishment enough, but to do that, then erase it, and create a completely different function is truly powerful,” she said.

Levy and his colleagues used the method to fashion a two-nanometer transistor they call a SketchFET. Given the SketchFET’s small size, many more transistors could be packed into a single device, he said.

The paper, “Oxide Nanoelectronics on Demand,” appeared in the Feb. 20 issue of Science. Levy also discusses the technique in videos published on YouTube.

NICE SEAT

You may not think much about the trim that decorates your car seats, but automobile designers do.
General Motors has purchased software designed to cut the time it takes to develop seat trim and to offer feedback on how much a seat would cost, said Ralf Eidt, global business leader of fabrics and trim covers at GM. The feedback happens earlier in the design cycle than it did before.

The software, Seat Design Environment, is from Vistagy Inc. of Waltham, Mass. It complements GM’s single computer-aided design system strategy because it’s integrated with the company’s CAD system of choice, Siemens NX, Eidt said.

The single CAD system allows engineers to share design detail across teams, obtain instant feedback on constantly changing design and cost data, and to automatically generate design and manufacturing documentation. As a result, OEMs and suppliers can reduce seat delivery time by months, Eidt said.

The seat design software allows engineers working within a CAD system to create a 3-D virtual product master model that automatically generates the data needed to document and manufacture the final product, he added.

Computer games are being developed at an ever-more rapid pace. But even today when computerized characters run into each other, they don’t exactly do so in a realistic way, according to Thomas Larsson, whose Ph.D. dissertation describes a way to create more lifelike collisions in games.

In the real world objects follow the rules of physics governing movement and collisions. But in a computer simulation objects can go right through each other as if they had never collided, unless special measures are taken.

Larsson, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Mälardalen University in Västerås, Sweden, said he’s come up with a way to keep animated figures from running right through each other. In his dissertation Larsson presented a model that allows complex figures to collide with each other in a credible way.

“Today, regular computers can draw realistic images of complex 3-D environments in the blink of an eye and this is exploited in modern computer games,” Larsson said. “These images are generated by a powerful graphics board in the computer, which draws millions of tiny surfaces, usually triangles, in a few milliseconds.”

But it’s not enough simply to draw the images. To animate or simulate objects that move or fly around on the screen, the objects need to be able to react to collisions. In many cases the collision calculations, just like the image generation itself, have to be done in a few milliseconds, Otherwise the interactivity and the experience are ruined, Larsson said.

Larsson’s method requires calculations about the ways objects collide with each other. In some cases he has objects change direction by bouncing off each other. In other cases the objects need to be dented, deformed, break into pieces, or even explode, he said.

Besides computer games, his method would be useful in robotics, virtual surgery, and visualization, he said. Larsson’s dissertation is available on a university Web site, www.mrtc.mdh.se/projects/3Dgraphics/phdthesis.

FIRST PLAYGROUND

First daughters Malia and Sasha Obama are climbing, swinging, and sliding on a specially designed playground set delivered to the White House in early March.

Rainbow Play Systems recently delivered this specialized playground set to the White House for installation just a few yards from the West Wing. It was designed using CAD software.

Rainbow Play Systems of Brookings, S.D., used SolidWorks CAD software to develop multiple configurations of parts and subsystems that made customizing the final design layout for the Obamas a simple process, said Jon Mattson, the company’s product design manager.

The playground is made from North American cedar and redwood and includes overhead monkey bars, shimmy bars, four standard swings, a tire swing, rock wall, step chain ladder, slide, binoculars, periscopes, and chalkboard. The system was installed near the Oval Office so President Obama can keep an eye on his daughters at play, Mattson added.

SolidWorks CAD software is developed by the company of the same name based in Concord, Mass.

FACEBOOK FOR PATENTS

Facebook is useful for finding old high school friends and keeping up with new ones, but does it have a role to play in speeding patent applications?

Yes, say a group of researchers at the Center for Technology Assessment. Online social networking tools could be used to eradicate the enormous backlog of United States patent applications, according to experts in intellectual property and patents.

Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace allow visitors to create networks of friends and contacts, and to upload images, music, videos, and news stories. Members can discuss, blog, and rate different media and provide feedback to others.

So how does that relate to what researcher Frank Peo said is a significant number of backlogged United States patent applications? Analyzing social networks uncovers patterns of interaction between people and reveals what is important and well regarded in a given group or community, including patent communities, Peo said. He’s a researcher at the center in University Park, Pa.

The system lets members connect with others within the same niche group to provide feedback on individual submissions, Peo said. This review-and-feedback is a formal step in the patent application process and could be speeded by allowing reviewers to communicate via social networking sites.

“The burgeoning backlog of patent applications at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office—several hundred thousand in any year—has created an urgent need for office reform,” Peo said. “Review of related application reference material—or prior art—is a necessary but time-consuming step in the patent process.

If prior art can be identified early in the assessment process then a patent claim could be discarded quickly—if necessary—and the patent examiner could move on to the next claim, he said.

In fact, the Patent and Trademark Office has already initiated a pilot project that uses social networking software to allow groups of volunteer review experts to upload prior art references, participate in discussion forums, rate other user submissions and add research references to pending applications.

That pilot project showed promise when it came to streamlining patent applications, Peo said. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office started the Peer Reviewed Prior Art Pilot in June 2007. Information on the program is available at the agency’s Web site, www.uspto.gov.

Patent offices in some countries outside the United States are also looking at social networking sites to help cut patent backlogs, Peo said.

Peo and his colleagues published their findings in the International Journal of Technology Transfer and Commercialisation, 2009, volume 8, no. 1.

WARP SPEED WIRELESS

Imagine hammering out a few cooking pots and cooking utensils every time you wanted to test a new recipe. Until just a couple of years ago, many electronics researchers testing new high-speed wireless technologies such as wireless networks, cellular telephones, or personal data assistants faced just this sort of challenge.

They had to build a test system board—to study how the wireless device or network would work—completely from scratch.

“It was incredibly frustrating,” said Ashutosh Sabharwal, director of Rice University’s Center for Multimedia Communication in Houston. In 2006, the center created a turnkey, open-source platform called the WARP board that would let wireless researchers test their systems without building their own boards.

“Our philosophy from the beginning had been to drive the cost lower and lower, to sell the boards for as little as possible in order to get them out there,” Sabharwal said. “Everyone we contacted seemed to want just the opposite, to mark them up as much as possible and sell to the few people that could afford high prices.”

WARP stands for wireless open-access research platform. Physically, WARP looks like something from the guts of a desktop computer: a collection of boards containing a powerful processor and all the transmitters and other gadgets needed for high-end wireless communications.

The lab sold equipment to about 40 university and corporate research groups before Patrick Murphy, a project manager at the Center for Multimedia Communications, founded Mango Communications of Houston in 2008 to take over production of the boards. Murphy is a former doctoral student at the center who developed the original WARP architecture.

The WARP boards are particularly flexible, Sabharwal said. When researchers need to test several kinds of radio transmitters, wireless routers, and network access points, they write a few programs that allow the WARP board to essentially become each of those devices.

BRIEFLY NOTED

Missler Software of Evry, France, has launched TopSolid’Cam 2009, which manages machining processes. /// DotSoft of Flemingsburg, Ky., has released PdfImport 2.0 for AutoCAD, which includes faster preview capabilities and better support for embedded images. /// The Open Design Alliance of Phoenix says the beta release of DWGdirect.NET, the platform component built for use with the Microsoft.NET framework, is available for download to the alliance’s members. /// Lambda Research Corp. of Littleton, Mass., has released an upgrade to its optomechanical design software, to TracePro 5.0. /// Geometric Ltd. of Mumbai, India, has released DFMPro version 2.0 for SolidWorks, a design-for-manufacturability analysis tool. The upgrade includes enhancements for sheet metal fabrication including assembly support and pre-programmed rules. /// Presentations made at SolidWorks World 2009, which was held in January in Orlando, Fla., are available on the Web at www.solidworks.com. /// CEI of Apex, N.C., has released an upgrade to its visualization product, to EnSight Lite, version 9.0. The software is aimed at small and medium-size companies. /// Acusim Software Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., maker of computational fluid dynamics products, and Intelligent Light of Rutherford, N.J., which makes CFD post-processing software, are now shipping AcuFieldView, a new OEM-bundled version of FieldView. /// ITI TranscenData of Milford, Ohio, is shipping Cadiq version 6.0, an analytical software application that verifies the manufacturability of 3-D CAD models throughout the lifecycle of a product. /// Ford Motor Co. has signed a new agreement with MSC.Software of Santa Ana, Calif. Under the new agreement Ford engineers will continue to use both MSC Nastran and Adams as their standard simulation tools. /// Autodesk of San Rafael, Calif., has retired its 2006 product line. Upgrades for those products are no longer available and Autodesk will no longer provide technical support, except for existing maintenance patches that are downloadable from www.autodesk.com.