From: Diego Montefusco Subject: Re: INFO: After some Virtual Reality software... >Can anyone help me? > >I saw an article on a program called 'Beyond 2000'. It showed a >Japanese power station (or some place that controls the cities >power ???) using a virtual reality s/w package to represent certain >electrical processes (this is vague as it was a long time ago). Flows >of electricity could be changed by moving an appropriate line in the >virtual reality environment. The only thing this description reminds me of is an application developed by Dr. Michitaka Hirose and his staff at the Univ. of Tokyo with the Tokyo Electric Power Company. The problem though wasn't to directly control the routing of energy through the network, but instead to dinamically program and re-program the control software behind it, inside a virtual environment. You could grab whole processes and move them along a timeline, resynch them and so on... I've been told that, although very interesting from a theoric point of view, the application wasn't successul as well on the practical side. A complete description of the work can be found in: Yamashita, Myoi, Amari, Hirose Visual Representation of Dynamic Flow of Software Processes in 7th Symposium on Human Interface, Oct 23-25, 1991 Kyoto (pp. 697-702) Hirose, Amari A Study on Visualization of Control Software Design in Computer Aided Cooperative Product Development, MIT-JSME Workshop, Springer-Verlag (1991) pp. 584-599 Hirose, Myoi, Amari, Inamura, Stark Development of Visual 3D Virtual Environment for Control Software in Human Machine Interfaces for Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, NASA Conference, Publication 10071 (1990) Dr. Michitaka Hirose can be reached at: hirose@ihl.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp Ciao, Diego - indipendent cybrarian - (Hi Toni!!) ------------------------------------------------------------------- | Diego Montefusco | Universita' di Milano | | Via Pirano, 4 | Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Informazione | | 20127 Milano, Italia | | | voice: +39 2 27001467 | montefus@dsi.unimi.it | | fax: +39 2 4982098 | Mai dire (or)mai | -------------------------------------------------------------------