Total Immersion (Immersive Engineering) SAIL now CHIL

Total Immersion By Jack Thornton | Nov 2011

"Sophisticated systems create digital environments where designs can be built, used, and serviced before a single part is made.

http://memagazine.asme.org/Articles/201 ... ersion.cfm [MORE]

Say your project is to design a new car or jet fighter. What will it look like? How will people operate it? Maintain it? Assemble it? Experienced design engineers often have a good idea of what the answers will be. But of course, when entering new territory, it’s impossible to foresee everything.

Immersive engineering, which combines motion capture, virtual reality, and other technologies, is intended to answer the questions in detail—and discover potential problems—long before anything is actually built. Fundamentally, immersive engineering integrates virtual reality with motion tracking technologies, computer-aided design, simulation and analysis, and solid modeling.

Immersive engineering is a new way of probing engineering issues—all together and all at once—from product design to manufacturability, assembly, quality, productivity, lifecycle costs, maintainability, and ergonomics. Companies that use the technology say it saves them money on a number of fronts.

Its proponents say that immersive engineering can shorten development time and reduce production and maintenance costs.....

...[LMs] newest system is the Collaborative Human Immersive Lab, or CHIL, which opened at the end of 2010 at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Littleton, Colo. All three installations are linked so analyses done in one can be shared in the others.

To prepare an immersive engineering simulation, tasks under study are performed or mimed by technicians and workers who wear a couple of dozen spherical reflectors or markers that enable the digital replication of their body movements—motion tracking. Whether attached to tight-fitting body suits or just mounted on heads and hands, markers locate and orient each joint in 3-D space and capture its movement for replay in the virtual world of an immersive simulation.

All the movement, up to six people working in sync on a complicated task, is captured and tracked by digital video cameras. Software sorts out and analyzes the overlaps in the digital images, then calculates object positions and human motion for use in additional simulations.

The Lockheed, Ford, and Sikorsky cameras and software, called Cortex, are provided by Motion Analysis Corp. of Santa Rosa, Calif. The company’s systems are also used in medicine and sports, for industrial measurement and control, and for animation in movie making....

...After the aircraft’s [F-35] design was complete, SAIL’s mission was broadened to include safety analyses and facility reviews. SAIL is now called the Human Immersive Lab...."

http://images.asme.org/MEMagazine/Artic ... /30390.jpg
http://images.asme.org/MEMagazine/Artic ... /30391.jpg

CHIL - Collaborative Human Immersive Lab

CHIL with the Video: http://youtu.be/itOxIpj68Mw
OR same just different URL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itOxIpj6 ... e=youtu.be

"Uploaded by LockheedMartinVideos on Jan 12, 2011
The future is now. No longer the subject of science fiction, immersive virtual reality is a powerful manufacturing tool that is revolutionizing the way we design and build modern spacecraft and aircraft."