Virtual reality is beginning to infiltrate real-world applications in a significant way – some see it becoming as ubiquitous in the design office of the mid-1990s as computer-aided design became in the 1980s – and Aldermaston, Berkshire-based Dimension International Ltd has won Colt International Ltd, Havant, Hamsphire as a customer for its Superscape virtual reality tool-kit (CI No 1,863, 1,898). Colt has developed Vegas, a prototype human behavioural modelling program, used within Dimension’s virtual reality operating system.
Human characteristics
It enables fire risks to be assessed based on human characteristics, such as the tendency for people to flock in some emergencies, combined with other variables such as layout, fire growth rate and smoke build-up, and is being used by London Underground and the British Railways Board in the design of stations for the Crossrail link between Paddington and Liverpool Street in an effort to ensure that a fire does not lead to a disaster. The system is designed to show how people would react to the threat of a fire on a platform. Colt sugg-ests that by programming observed behaviour in real emergencies, the designers end up with a system that is more accurate than an exercise with real people would be, since people do not always react in the same way when their lives are really in dan-ger as they do in an exercise. Di-mension’s real-time fully interactive virtual reality system enables users to experience future or past events in three dimensions. Operators move around by using a space ball, which is a proportional device that measures hand pressure, and several operators can run the system simultaneously in a network. Intelligence can be programmed into the system in C so that objects in the virtual world can be given properties such as acceleration, friction, temperature and sound. Superscape’s shape editor supports input from AutoCAD using DXF files, and there is a library of virtual clip-art buildings, bollards, trees and so forth – which can be added to and saved to help speed up the creation of virtual worlds. The Superscape toolkit comes in two parts, one to enable virtual worlds to be created and the other a run-time system that enables travel through and visualisation of these worlds. The desktop software needs a 50MHz 80486-based personal computer with high-resolution graphics.
