VTCPresenceReal-time Virtual Presence for Test Cell Monitoring

Air Force test cells are complex facilities providing controlled environment for testing/evaluation of supersonic and hypersonic systems and hardware performance at flight conditions. Accurate performance evaluation requires the capability to run controlled, accurate, consistent, and repeatable acceptance tests that rely heavily on monitoring of the cell conditions. Current monitoring systems have very limited capabilities and there is need to develop virtual reality (VR) systems supported by simultaneous visualization of the physical quantities measured by test cell sensors. Intelligent Automation, Inc. (IAI) proposes to develop VTCPresence, a virtual reality system capable of virtually placing a user into an active test cell. The proposed VTCPresence combines live data from many ruggedized 3D cameras into a single textured point cloud and uses it with available telemetry data to provide maintenance and analysis engineers (users) with a virtual copy of the test cell. VTCPresence will adapt IAIs novel 3D processing technologies with 3D depth cameras to construct a virtual reality environment. The user of VTCPresence will see a 3D view of the inside of the test cell, reconstructed from 3D camera data, plus overlays displaying relevant instrument readings and telemetry from the test cell.