Wednesday, July 14, 2004

Excursion into virtuality

I meant to blog on this Monday but never got around to it...

On Monday we had a plant tour. It is always fun to see what the different areas of the plant have to offer, considering that KCP can do just about anything, from materials production to advanced microchip engineering - all under one roof. So I got to see a water cutting machine that uses simple H2O to cut up to 8 inch-thick blocks of steel, gears smaller than a grain of sand, and virtual reality. Yes, virtual reality. For the first time, I donned head-gear and walked in a 3D virtual world! You could turn your head and the visual would change to another part of the virtual environment. Your "virtual hand" could interact with objects. It was amazing! Not quite a Star Trek holodeck, and at times it was a little polygon-ic, but nevertheless it was one of the neatest things I've ever seen done with a computer. How 'bout them apples, folks? We really CAN make virtual reality work!