I’ve been fortunate to be involved in a lot of different engineering “things” at my day job when it comes to designing and building satellites. I’ve worked on all phases of satellite missions, from when we write and prepare proposals all the way through designing, building, testing, launching, and operating (although not usually on the same mission). This is real, physical stuff for the real world. Real hardware. Real software. Should we care about “virtual reality?” Isn’t that the stuff of video games and science fiction?

Yes, to both.

First, I need to start off by explaining the basic difference between Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. They often get lumped together* and while there are some similarities, their differences are more defining and important to understand because it means how they are used is VERY different. Look around you. That’s your reality. Put on a device, like a pair of glasses, that doesn’t cut you off from that reality but might overlay some digital content. That’s “Augmented Reality.” It is literally augmenting what you see. Now put on a device that completely cuts off your vision from the real world and replaces what you see (and maybe hear, and someday feel) with something different, digital, and virtual… that’s Virtual Reality. 

The Holodeck of Star Trek:TNG (and DS9, Voyager, etc.) is an extreme evolution of today’s virtual reality where the device isn’t something you wear, it’s a room you walk into. 

When we are in Virtual Reality, partially cut off from the real world around us, we are indeed in a parallel digital world that exists alongside our own. While Star Trek Holodeck realism isn’t yet possible, there is still a host of meaningful things we can do today with what we have available. 

Virtual reality is inherently an interactive medium. Somewhere around 30 years ago, computers and CAD started to replace 2D mechanical drawing. It was recent enough that some readers will remember when this happened.

I started my career during the transition… In 1993, the Space Physics Group hired me at the University of Maryland to be a CAD drafter. I was using Autodesk v11 (or was it 10 and we transitioned to 11 while I was there?) But the remnants of mechanical drawing were still there. We had a drafting table. Hard plastic drawing triangles were still in the desk drawers and hung on the walls. Not all the manufacturers we worked with could accept a digital file, so we still turned our digital drawings into blueprints — I can still remember the ammonia smell and the feel of them as my boss showed me the proper way to fold up a D-size drawing. 

CAD was definitely a game-changer since it made the process of making changes much quicker. As the internet became more ubiquitous, it made sharing those drawings with people not local to you quicker and easier. As the manufacturers upgraded their technology, eventually not only did they get a digital version of the drawing, that digital version gets immediately supplied to the machine itself, like a CNC, speeding up that process as well. 

CAD did eventually completely replace mechanical drawing. Sometimes technology does that, and sometimes it was obvious that it was going to happen.

Not so much with VR. I frequently have colleagues tell me that they don’t see how gaming tech can apply to the engineering world. That is until I make them put on a headset…

In the engineering process we follow, VR certainly isn’t about to replace anything today. This process we follow, in general engineering terms, is defined by a series of steps that take us from concept to satellite-in-hand that we launch and operate. Unlike how blueprints went from a piece of (often large) paper to digital, no one thinks we can launch a digital satellite — so the analogy breaks down there.

But all the engineering work, until we can build a prototype (if we can build a prototype — it’s not always practical) and the final article, takes place on a 2D screen. With a 2D screen, a lot of interpretation is left up to individual perception. Because of no failing of their own, not everyone can imagine what that 2D image would really be like in 3D. Even a 3D model on a 2D screen, even if it’s one of those isometric models so you can tell it’s meant to be 3D, is still a 2D image on a 2D monitor. It’s a limited view. It’s also small. Because of those limitations, I could have a group of half a dozen engineers look at that screen, and we all don’t translate it into “real” 3D in the same way.

Enter VR. With VR, you are standing next to or inside the model. Much less is left up to imagination and interpretation. If we use this tool at selected points in the engineering process, we are giving ourselves access to what is currently out of reach physically and economically. No, we haven’t replaced anything like CAD replaced mechanical drawings, but we’ve added a valuable tool to our toolbox. 

Places in the general engineering process where VR can help:

• Researching ideas and exploring possibilities
• Considering alternative solutions
• Modeling prototypes without the expense or time involved in making and buying hardware
• Testing and evaluation
• Communicate with teammates, management, and customers

It allows us to do these things without investing in potentially expensive hardware. It saves manufacturing time that way, too. Of course there are things we still might choose to do this with… If you’re building a small device, prototyping with a 3D printer might make sense and could be affordable. But this is not practical with a complicated spacecraft that is expensive, although we often 3D print specific parts along the way.

30 or 40 years ago, when PCs were becoming a thing, many people said they weren’t necessary… and now look at how ubiquitous the technology is. VR (and AR) is poised to be the same. And I can’t help and wonder what my currently VR-poo-poohing colleagues were back when they saw their first PC.

I love computers and technology. I’ve watched them become that ubiquitous tool over the last 30 or 40 years, although I didn’t know what I was seeing at the time. Just a tool I grew up with, and was one of only a small number of friends I knew with a computer as a kid in the early 80s. As I entered the workforce in the 90s, everyone was getting one. I didn’t think any deeper about it back then.

Computers are an amazing tool for scientists and engineers. While they’ve increased the speed at which computation and analysis can get done (as opposed to the pre-computer era where everything was done with slide rules, log tables, etc.), they introduced a level of abstraction and took away some of the physical intuition that comes with designing and then prototyping a part. 

VR can bring back some of that intuition that comes from hands-on experience. In the last few years, VR headsets and the computers to run them have made this technology economically justifiable… more so that it had ever been in the past. Even a digital, hands-on, life-size model that you can walk around in, in a virtual space, is superior to a 2D screen, no matter how advanced that high definition monitor is. I expect to see haptic devices in the next few years become as equally economically justifiable, and a host of other improvements such that when my kiddos are in their 20s, and start a job as an engineer or scientist someplace (a mom can dream, right?), besides their highly advanced PC, their issued a VR headset on their first day.

(* by “lumped together” I mean I’ve found myself in conversations where I’m talking about VR, and the person I’m talking to is imaging AR)