Reality check: immersive visualisation in design

There’s a short slope in front of the 8ft- high projection screen housed inside the Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) building. It’s there to warn users of the 3D visualisation suite that they’re about to walk into the display, in case the immersive experience of three-dimensional life-size photorealistic graphics leads them to forget. From what The Engineer experienced when we visited WMG at Warwick University, it’s very much needed.

Watching computer simulations is no longer a case of staring at abstract shapes or 1990s-style video-game-quality images move around a monitor. Thanks to the development of hardware, software and processor power, designers can experience their creations with incredible realism, making changes that appear in real time.

WMG does this through means of a ‘powerwall’, a 5m and 4,000-pixel-wide back- projected screen that creates 3D images with four times the quality of HD video. Head-tracking software that follows markers on users’ 3D glasses allows them to effectively move around objects on the screen. And importing data from laser scans of real or prototype objects can add a whole other level of detail. ‘You can see the surface; you can see the lighting effects,’ said Prof Mark Williams, product evaluation technologies group leader at Warwick University. ‘You can change the reflection of the paint and see how that affects the style.’