National Science Foundation funds Rowan CAVE®

August 20, 2008



Virtual reality tool will assist with work for NASA, others

The National Science Foundation has awarded Rowan University College of Engineering professors a $392,000 Major Research Instrumentation Grant to purchase a CAVE®, a fully-immersive, navigable and interactive virtual reality system.

Drs. Shreekanth Mandayam, chair of Electrical & Computer Engineering, and Beena Sukumaran, an associate professor in Civil & Environmental Engineering, will work with undergraduate and graduate students in the 10x10x10 foot CAVE on a variety of research projects starting in spring 2009. The CAVE® will be installed at in the Virtual Reality Applications Center at the new South Jersey Technology Park at Rowan University in Mantua Township, about a mile from the main campus in Glassboro. The grant runs from September 1, 2008, until August 31, 2011, for the Rowan CAVE®, which will be the only such device in South Jersey.

"The CAVE® is a room. It's like the holodeck of the Enterprise. It's an immersive, interactive and navigable 3-D simulation of reality. It provides a virtual reality simulation of any environment that you desire," Mandayam explained.

He'll be using the facility to conduct research related to the new Constellation rocket systems that will be launched for Moon and Mars missions for the NASA-Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. At NASA, engineers test rocket engines before they are bolted onto the rest of the system and launched into space. At Rowan, Mandayam and his team will conduct simulated tests on engines in the CAVE®, which the professor said is useful for advanced scientific visualization and rapid prototyping and can simulate complex industrial systems such as the NASA space rocket engine test stands.

"The CAVE® allows us to analyze the data that come from a rocket engine test so we can simulate ‘what if' scenarios," Mandayam said. "That's the benefit of virtual reality. It's much more cost effective to simulate anomalous conditions."

Mandayam and students will conduct similar virtual reality work for the U.S. Navy, for which Rowan has conducted research on shipboard conditions, simulating leaks and catastrophes in a virtual world, for more than two years.

Both the Navy operation in Philadelphia and NASA-Stennis have CAVEs®. Mandayam said that Rowan researchers will be able to run simulations in Gloucester County that engineers and scientists at those two locations will be able to link to through their CAVEs®.

Sukumaran will use the CAVE® to conduct research on how sands behave, which is important to understanding how to design foundations of any type of infrastructure, from houses to hospitals to bridges.

"The CAVE will be used for three-dimensional simulation and visualization to study how sandy materials behave during an earthquake or loading by a structure and will be used for collaborative work with researchers at the University of Sydney, Australia," Sukumaran said.

The CAVE® will expand Rowan's virtual reality work. For more than five years, College of Engineering teams have been working with a portable, semi-immersive system based at the University on projects for government organizations and major businesses, evaluating gas pipelines, among other structures.

In addition to supporting research, the CAVE® has the potential to impact work force development in South Jersey, Mandayam said, because students, technicians and engineers can be trained to operate high-tech equipment that's being used to design aircrafts, automobiles and buildings and will be able to complete such tasks as simulating a building to evaluate its environmental impact before construction. "It's a great thing for the region, for South Jersey," he said.

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