A Focus on Mechanical CAD

During the first year, the primary application will be mechanical CAD. A new process for designing and making mechanical parts will be created.

A part's shape will be roughed out using an intuitive interface (building on the SKETCH tool from Brown University). A user will can then pick up a newly designed virtual part and toss it through the wall (or slide it on the shared desk surface) to other users in their cubicles for further refinement. Assemblies of multiple parts can then be set in motion using intuitive authoring tools based on Alice, from CMU, and Body Electric.

Once users have refined the design of a virtual part, they can toss it over to a virtual office at the University of Utah. There the part is rendered in real matter by numerically controlled milling equipment. It is then delivered in physical form to the designers by overnight courier.

The mechanical design process will be made faster, more collaborative, and more clear to all participants. In fact, the initiative will build some of its own parts, such as optical assembly mountings, using this process.

As important as the advances in mechanical CAD are in themselves, there is an additional strategic benefit in the structure of the initiative. There are, as it happens, two pre-existing and well-funded efforts in the works to improve tele-collaboration for mechanical CAD. These efforts involve a five-university program funded by NSF and a NASA program, centered in part at USC. These two efforts will be linked for the first time through the Tele-Immersion initiative. By leveraging the existing efforts, the Tele-Immersion initiative will be able to share and test its new mechanical CAD process as part of the most far-reaching national research efforts in the field.

In addition, a small placeholder medical mini-application will be demonstrated, probably involving the display of fetal development data from Yale University. This is important because medicine will probably be one of the principal driving applications of Tele-immersion as it progresses.