Virtual Reality system offers engineers new monitoring perspectives!

An innovative virtual reality system, developed in the UK, for various engineering purposes, aims in helping scientists as well as medium-sized engineering firms simulate and visualize any working environment. At a very competitive price, VuePod, is expected to become extremely popular in the engineering and construction industries, revolutionizing current engineering practice.

VuePod is a 3D visualization environment that, unlike other virtual reality products targeting the entertainment and gaming industries, addresses the needs of engineers to have accurate and complete representations of the environment, allowing them to interact with a site in many ways. Virtual representations of the environment are produced using data assembled by LIDAR laser-scanning technology. LIDAR equipment is either installed on airplanes that fly over the area of interest scanning the ground, or mounted on low-cost drones, taking contiguous images of the site. Assembled data is displayed by means of a set of 12 high definition 55-inch 3D television screens, assembled in one huge 108 sqf screen, which is controlled with a Wii remote through a Bluetooth device called SmartTrack. Users' experience can be further enhanced through 3D glasses, giving the user an entirely new perspective to monitoring a site. 

Developed by Professor Ames and his team of the Department of Civil Engineering at Brigham Young University, VuePod is initially aimed for use in environmental engineering projects. Hence, based on two separate sets of data, taken five years apart, the system has been used to virtually reproduce a canyon area beneath a plateau in the south of Idaho and track changes, which could not be otherwise detected. Professor Ames and the team's ambition is to produce a competitively priced technology for use by the engineering and construction industry. And with a cost a little more than US$30,000, VuePod certainly has a distinctive advantage over other similar million dollars worth systems for monitoring and inspection of different infrastructure projects. 

To learn more on VuePod, visit its official webpage here!