Virtual reality as a cross-domain language in collaborative environments

Abstract

Working in the space domain means working in a complex and challenging domain, but also dealing with huge amount of datasets and several actors (engineers, scientists, discipline experts, etc.). To fully exploit people’s knowhow and all the available data, it is necessary to find a way to ease the communication and collaboration among the actors involved. Virtual Reality is the solution. It enables new methods and techniques to create a collaborative environment where all the experts can join their effort for a common objective: the analysis, visualization and dissemination of data and information. ALTEC strongly believes in this vision and it is developing its own Virtual Reality Laboratory in order to support programs and activities already ongoing in the company, but also to enable new researches, collaborations, projects and a better dissemination of achievements and results. ALTEC is also participating to the EU FP7 CROSS DRIVE project which aims at creating innovative tools and techniques for the visualization and sharing of exploration data to strength collaborative science data analysis and real-time operations. The Mission Control Center (MCC) of the CROSS DRIVE Collaborative Environment will be hosted in ALTEC exploiting the functionalities of ALTEC VR-Lab. ALTEC VR-Lab and the work done within CROSS DRIVE project are described in this paper.