The Magic of Engineering for the Customer
Creating a schedule for the first time can be a daunting task, especially for a first year engineering student. There are so many aspects to consider…
The coolest thing I did this summer (or maybe this year… or my life) was visit the Virtual Reality Center aka “The Cave.” I had an internship at SolidWorks, which is a computer aided design (CAD) software heavily used by mechanical engineers to model and test parts before manufacturing. Caves are often used to showcase all of the software that a CAD company makes in a 3D world. SolidWorks is part of Dassault Systemes, which has 10 other computer aided design related brands. This cave had a lot to show off.
I walked into a dark room that had 15 theater-like seats facing a small stage. The stage had 3 large walls that made half of a box. When a scene was playing, it was like watching an IMAX movie complete with the 3D glasses, although the scene was controllable by the viewers.
The coolness was when I was on stage. I stepped up into this human size diorama-like contraption, and put on some funky glasses with orbs sticking off of them. Now I was the one controlling the scene, and it was a completely immersive experience. The projectors reacted to my body movements, so crouching, turning my head, or moving around activated the sensors in the orbs and adjusted the scene visuals accordingly. One of the scenes is a car crash, there is one where you can test drive a car, another where you can travel through an anatomically correct beating human heart of a 39-year-old man or even play a video game.
Punnily enough, the scene I explored was a cave… in a cave (hah!). Due to a pretty strong fear of bats, caves aren’t places I typically like to hang out, but these were the Lascaux caves of France. A group of teenagers found the caves in the 1940s, and became famous because they also found cave paintings that were over 17,000 years old. This scene was particularly special because public access to the caves was closed in the early 60s to prevent any further damage. This couldn’t stop me from climbing the cave walls and looking at the paintings up close, crouching into the crevices and looking at the rocks (I turned into a rock nerd after taking geology last semester), or finding some animals hiding throughout the cave. It was all virtual! I could move around with just a joystick, with the worst damage going to a very expensive machine. Okay, so that still isn’t a good idea.
I got a sense of what shopping might look like, virtually, how doctors will be conducting surgery or diagnosing patients, and how education will be transformed through these immersive experiences. When the hardware becomes cheap and powerful enough to run software that already exists, this world will have a lot more twins - in the virtual world. I was awestruck for hours. I enjoy learning, building, and making things, but what motivates me is innovation. That is why I am an engineer.
Feature image credit:"1" by Bayes Ahmed licensed under CC BY 2.0
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