This Canadian Press article takes a look at some VR projects going on at University of Alberta AMMI Lab. From the article: "On the cutting edge of virtual reality research, fantasy is used to fix reality, create reality and even push new boundaries in art, with music that can not only be heard but also seen.
"You'll find bigger systems, more powerful systems, but the issue is what you do with it," says Walter Bischof of the Advanced Man Machine Interface Laboratory on the University of Alberta campus.
"Our push is to use virtual reality in research and applications. That's the strength of this lab."
The lab, known as AMMI for short, has been operating for more than seven years, solving problems and preventing headaches for a wide range of professionals.
The centrepiece is "the Cave" - the centre's virtual reality room. It's a three-walled area surrounded by projectors and centred on a joystick on a stand.
Stand in the middle of the Cave with your 3-D glasses and you can drive or fly around a virtual reality streetscape, go inside a brain to see the interplay of neurons, tour a theatre set, walk through a museum gallery or float in space and get an up-close look at the Earth's magnetosphere with its long, waving tendrils of energy splaying out to make our planet resemble a giant squid.
In the next room is the 3-D scanner, a movable arm on a stationary rod that is free to circle and measure any object, which can then be displayed in the Cave.
Nearby is a state-of-the-art 270-gigaflop graphics computer that now fits under a desk but just 10 years ago would have been the world's fastest supercomputer.
Beside the Cave, researcher Steve Eliuk is putting the final touches on his galaxy.
His virtual reality program, soon to be launched in the Cave, uses star data from NASA and the Hayden Planetarium to recreate our galaxy, including a 120,000-body star field, and planets rotating around the sun in real time. Virtual astronauts can aim for a star, fly to it and even through it, or zero in on a planet for an up-close inspection.
Eliuk is now working on a program that will depict particle discharges from the sun during solar flares to see how those discharges affect other planets.
"This is really beneficial to learn more about the solar flares because of their ability to knock out whole power grids on Earth," he said.
Beside Eliuk, PhD student Robyn Taylor, a classically trained soprano, sits in front of a laptop with a microphone facing software images of jellyfish swimming in a tank. As her voice lifts and lowers through the scale, the colours of the jellyfish respond in shimmering hues of blue, red and yellow - a synthesis of colour and sound that Taylor transforms into performance art.
"Everything that happens in this kind of a performance is one-time, ephemeral, where people will get to see something they will never get to see or hear again," said Taylor, who has used the system in shows across the country.
The centre, headed up by Pierre Boulanger, who came to the University of Alberta after building the first virtual reality lab at National Research Council Canada in Ottawa, is also pioneering work in other areas.
They are working on a prototype of a glove that could allow a surgeon literally to have his hand manipulated by another specialist thousands of kilometres away.
Businesses are already saving millions of dollars in research and development through virtual research. In one case, the AMMI lab helped solve the problem of a clutch fork that kept inexplicably breaking in a truck's transmission system.
"The solution in the real world was to make the part out of amazingly overpriced metal at 10 times the (original) cost," said Eliuk.
Instead, he said, Boulanger scanned the object in 3-D and found it was simply being machined incorrectly so that the entire force of the system was momentarily focused on one section that, of course, then broke.
They fixed the machine process and that fixed the fork.
Sometimes, the virtual reality processes come full circle. In one Cave program the participant walks through a maze of three-dimensional images of guitars. One of those images was taken and converted into real 3-D form with a special printer that prints in layers of plastic.
"We have an object that isn't even real at all," said Taylor. "We had it in virtual space."
"And now we have a physical representation of a virtual object," she said, holding the plastic guitar replica in the palm of her hand.
Art imitating life imitating art."