No abstract

Material and energy resource consumption is on the rise in both the industrialized and developing world (e.g., countries like India and China). In order to sustain this growth and provide resources for future generations, there is a need to design products that are easy to recover and recondition, thus enabling multiple use cycles. Processes are needed that can achieve this multi-use while producing zero (or very near zero) waste. There exist a number of barriers and challenges to achieving this vision of multi-use with zero waste; one such challenge is the development of a product recovery infrastructure that will minimize short-term impacts due to existing products and will be robust enough to recover products of the future. This paper identifies the barriers to developing such a recovery and reuse infrastructure. The aim is to achieve product multi-use and zero waste.

Virtual reality (VR) systems have the potential for alleviating the existing constraints on various natural and social resources. Currently, real-time applications of VR systems are hampered by the tediousness of creating virtual environments. Furthermore, todayâ??s VR systems only stimulate the human senses of vision, hearing and â?? to some extent touch â?? which prevents the system users to feel fully immersed in the virtual environment. By integrating real physical devices with virtual environments, the user interactions with such systems can be improved and advanced technologies such as the MS Kinect system could be used to augment the environments themselves. While existing development platforms for VR systems are expensive, game engines provide a more efficient method for integrating VR with physical devices. In this paper, an efficient approach for integrating virtual environments and physical devices is presented. This approach employs modifications of games that are based on commercially available game engines for implementing the virtual environments in conjunction with the application of Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs) for realizing versatile communications between these virtual environments and various application platforms, which in turn can interact with the physical devices outside of the virtual environments. This paper is divided into four sections. In the first section, the motivation for the developments described here is discussed, followed by a description of the method used to integrate virtual environments with physical devices in the second section. In the third section, an interactive and collaborative laboratory environment based on a multi-player computer game engine that is linked to physical experimental setups is presented as an example of a VR system. In the final section, some additional promising applications of the developed platform and the corresponding challenges are briefly introduced.

Geometric visualization, the spatial perception of problems, and geometric reasoning are always considered essential skills for an engineering student. Although the student can learn geometric visualization eventually, some students with the missing visualization skills cannot follow the instructions to solve the engineering problems. Immersive mixed reality (MR) technologies have been used by the author to help students with object visualization problems. MR technologies virtually project the objects and allow students observing three dimensional (3D) representation of two dimensional (2D) sketches in front of them, while also rotating the virtual model as they wish. These educational mobile applications have been tested in engineering drawing classes and overall improvement of student visualization skills has been reported. In this study, the research question is if some students benefit more from the immersive technologies. Some students have previous CAD experiences from their high school education or interest in technology as a hobby. Playing video games gives students some visualization skills too. Pre‐ and post‐ mental rotation tests (MRTs) are analyzed along with their pre‐existing educational and video game experiences to evaluate the level of benefits of MR technology in class.