FLINT ? Mott Community College, a sponsor of GLIMAEast, is experimenting with a 3D visualization system that it hopes will teach its students about rapid prototyping. Tom Crampton, Executive Dean for Regional Technology Initiative, also said he hopes the 3D equipment becomes a magnet to attract even more engineering students to Mott.
?We?ve got a couple hundred students in our design programs,?? Crampton said. ?The technology also could draw more students to Mott.?
Mott also is heavy in health care education. The school could teach health care professionals to use the technology to precisely locate tumors and other abnormalities due to the highly realistic rendering of the human body that 3DH provides. Another tool, called virtual surgery, allows doctors to remove tissue on the hologram first, giving the insight to how a surgical procedure will be performed.
?Our faculty also wants to use it in health care, so we could probably have 500 to 600 students at Mott using it in the fourth quarter,?? Crampton said.
The technology was traded to Mott by 3DH Corp. of Knoxville, Tenn., for content and other considerations. 3DH is an R&D facility and plans to work with manufacturers to get its products into the marketplace. CEO Lynn Cundiff said his 3D HoloProjection system composed of three computers equipped with 3D software and two projectors. Students will use glasses with polarized lenses to view objects in three dimensions. They?ll also get a camera system for them to film live people and events. Will be delivered in a week or two. Another component will let Mott do 3D holoconferencing. The first components were delivered a month ago.
The technology actually has been around for a hundred years and was used in stereo opticoms of the 19th century. 3D also made a comeback in the 1950s in movie theaters, but the cheap paper glasses and poor optics made a lot of movie goers sick. 3DH?s new wrinkle is the software, which takes into account 23 psychological parameters, meaning no motion sickness when you view the 3D images.
?We can put a chair in the middle of your office and your mind will accept that chair is there,?? he said. ?That?s the process part. We developed two software programs that work inside this system that allows us to take data and run it through one system. You can then examine parts of a body. A 3D MRI scan look at your heart in real time and let doctors work through it millimeter by millimeter to see how the valves are functioning.?
3DH?s game plan is to install the equipment in about 10 colleges to demonstrate its viability to the world. Mott is the Michigan recipient. Users eventually will be charged from $3,000 to $90,000 for the system and an annual fee to download 3D content.
This article appeared in the October edition of GLIMA Connections. To learn more about GLIMA, click on GLIMA.Com
