Agata Soccini is a Research Fellow Università degli Studi di Torino at Thales Alenia Space. She talks about how virtual reality is used to train astronauts, visualize galactic data, as well as analyze thermal data about space ships.
Specifically, she was at the IEEE VR conference giving a talk about doing aerothermodynamic analysis of the Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV) within VR. The IXV is an European Space Agency (ESA) experimental suborbital re-entry vehicle (spaceplane prototype) to validate European reusable launchers, and she says that when you match up the actual data to the the actual location on the space ship that even a layman could start to interpret the results. Overall, they were trying to see how well the data from their simulations matched up with the real-world data.
Agata also talks about some of the other procedures that astronauts need to be able to perform, and how they use Haption haptic devices to simulate interacting with zero-gravity objects. There aren’t a lot of astronauts in their program, but there’s been enough feedback to know that these simulations have been very effective to training the astronauts to go through these procedures.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.025] Agata Soccini: My name is Agata Succini. I work in Torino in Italy at university. I do VR for the design of spacecrafts. I work at Thales Alenia Space. We do a lot of projects with the European Space Agency and we built a framework to develop virtual reality applications that we run in a cave or in desktops. All this for collaborative system engineering.
[00:00:40.133] Kent Bye: Great, so you're building VR systems so that the engineers can build better spacecraft, or maybe you could talk a bit about who's using the VR systems and what they're precisely doing with them.
[00:00:50.899] Agata Soccini: We use VR for several things. For example, we have the representation of the International Space Station into a cave, so many astronauts can come there and do their training before they go up there, actually. Or we have a representation of all the known galaxies, as well as all the satellites we build and all the spacecrafts we build so far. So Thales Alenia Space made things like Rosetta and Philae. In 2004 something was shooting the space from Earth and in 2014 these little things landed on a comet. So that's why I think that many people heard about it because it happened in October 2014. Europeans were very excited because usually NASA does this kind of things but we made it great this time. Also, what I talked about yesterday, I had my talk and I explained how we use VR to interface very old-school tools with our really fancy way of sharing ideas. So, let's say that we have a spacecraft, for example, I work on IXV, which is a project of the European Space Agency. and we built the interfaces to aerothermodynamics analysis tools, so that any kind of person, even those who have no idea of what aerothermodynamics are, is able to see the temperature of this shuttle during its flight, of every point of the shuttle in every second of the flight. So, even people who do not do aerothermodynamics but work in this field and work at Stellar Satellite Space or at the European Space Agency or me and you, we can go, can understand the behavior of the spacecraft during the flight. Also, now that it all went well, it was launched on February 11th, now we have all the data that can be compared with, we have the real data that can be compared with the simulations that we did before the flight.
[00:03:01.825] Kent Bye: I see. And so, tell me a bit more about being able to explore all the different galaxies, and are there specific scientific questions that people are, you know, looking at, or is it just really cool to kind of zip around and see all the different galaxies in kind of a virtual reality 3D cave?
[00:03:16.792] Agata Soccini: It is very cool, actually. But it is scientific at the same time, because we do representations of real data, so you can see where the satellites are in this moment for real, or you can see where the ISS is now. And also, when I talk about galaxies, we have represented all the data that humans have about the galaxies. So, there are a few areas of the outer space that we never investigated. And when I say we, I mean humans, that humans haven't investigated yet. So, we represented nothing there. But we have a map of all the galaxies and we have a map of the, let's say, most visible stars from Earth and most famous. And for the rest, we have an approximation of the rest of the stars. So it is quite scientific and you can use it to do simulations. Let's say that, for example, we can represent the surface of the planets, which is very accurate. There are things like leaders flying around Mars. We get the data from the leaders. and we are able to reconstruct exactly the surface. I did myself the Victoria Crater, for example, and somebody at Stellaneous Space gave us the maps of the rover, so we were able to see if the rover is able to go to work on Mars. Or let's say they give us a lender. We can do a simulation and see if the lender can lend, actually. So this is what we do. So you can do tests or you can use our virtual environment to test some intelligent systems, some artificial vision systems. So maybe something is approaching and we can try to interface an artificially intelligent agent with this terrain and see if the agent is able to find a certain path on that terrain. So yes, we have a scientific side.
[00:05:20.095] Kent Bye: Are most of the applications of scientists or astronauts doing things in VR, are they mostly doing it by themselves? Are there any situations or use cases where they're collaborating with each other in these virtual environments?
[00:05:32.023] Agata Soccini: It's almost never one person. We are there all the time because the cave is right beside our office. And when astronauts come, they come there to talk to engineers and discuss some parts of the mission. Or, for example, several different people with completely different backgrounds can share their point of views and show actually the representation of their study and the results of their research instead of just saying numbers. So it's very collaborative and that's the main goal of the use of virtual reality.
[00:06:08.513] Kent Bye: I see and it sounds like there's also a pretty clear use case for training because you know it's kind of hard to be in space and so but it's also you have gravity here. How is that translation to doing virtual reality training simulations and when you're in zero gravity environments versus in gravity environments and how well that translates?
[00:06:28.008] Agata Soccini: We talked about it with astronauts and actually they have accurate panels in front of them. So when they have to try a procedure, they said they are so concentrated on the procedure that they really don't mind that their feet are on the ground. So let's say they have to push certain buttons and use certain tools. So it's not important to be at zero gravity and at the same time we also use haptic devices. So they concentrate on the haptic side of the simulation and we asked them that because of course we thought about the same thing before but the simulations and the use of VR came out to be effective even with gravity.
[00:07:08.270] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so how do you measure the effectiveness of these training simulations? Or how do you improve them? Or, you know, clearly it has some benefit, but I'm just curious how you get that feedback loop in terms of making sure that it works in the first place, but also in the future improving it.
[00:07:25.338] Agata Soccini: We talk a lot with our users about the benefits they get. And as our users are not so many, because if you think of astronauts, they're not like millions and millions of people using our applications every day. So we have the opportunity to talk a lot to them and see what they want. If they have some ideas, we are able to try the suggestions. And from there we see how good it is. If we find something that we feel could work, we submit it to the others. So as we don't have many users, it's very easy to see what's working and what is not working. And they are usually very open to try our new applications. And same thing for scientists and engineers inside our huge enterprise.
[00:08:13.176] Kent Bye: Yeah and it seems like with haptics it's a very specific kind of targeted use case when it's the most effective I've seen when it's trying to mimic a very specific action and so talk a bit about that process of trying to match the haptics with what is actually happening and because it seems like haptics is one of those areas that when you're doing a very specific task it works but if you're trying to make haptics apply for everything it doesn't work so well.
[00:08:37.403] Agata Soccini: Of course, of course. Let's say that if you are investigating something about the trajectory of planets and satellites, you don't really need haptics. But, for example, if you are training astronauts for the International Space Station and they are interacting with a panel, that's where you use haptics. So we have one made from Haption, actually. We use the Haption module to simulate the interior, the indoor part of the ISS, for example. And so there's just sort of handles or weights or... Talking about the question you asked me before, you can simulate the zero gravity in this case, so you have no force coming from the sky, coming from the Z. In this case you can simulate the zero gravity, just for the hand of course, not for the person, we're not floating.
[00:09:24.715] Kent Bye: Right, I guess these Haption devices have the capability to exert force, but I'm just curious what it feels like to use a Haptic device that's trying to simulate space.
[00:09:33.757] Agata Soccini: Well, let's say that if you are into the ISS, you can be in any room. You do a simulation as if you were in any room, in any other room on the planet Earth. At the same time, let's say that if you take a screw out of a panel, it's not going to fall. So these kind of things you can consider if you want to simulate zero gravity. Or also, I don't know, for example, you have feedback from the z-axis, from up, and in that case, you can say, do not add the gravity force. So you're going to have a softer feedback. That's what I meant.
[00:10:07.830] Kent Bye: And finally, I'm curious about, you know, some of the stuff that you have on the horizon or some of the stuff that you're developing for the future of doing space simulation and working with these astronauts and other things that you kind of have with using virtual reality and training and whatever else you may be working on here in the future.
[00:10:24.522] Agata Soccini: For example, right now we're starting a new collaborative project, so we are interfacing the tools of every discipline into our enterprise with our virtual reality system. It means that we are going to have a big platform in which all the calculations of the physical quantities of the spacecraft will be done and shared. in a virtual reality environment. It means that you will be able to be in the cave. From there, you'll be able to pick any quantity you want. It doesn't matter what it is about, where it comes from, if it's aerothermodynamic quantity or just a thermal quantity. Whatever it is, you can put all those informations together. It's quite tricky to understand, I think, at least for me, because it's very specific. So it might be that evident at once. It's really cutting time and productivity. So on one side you have a scientific and industrial benefit, on the other side you really have fun.
[00:11:29.624] Kent Bye: What got you into VR? What motivates you to participate in working in VR?
[00:11:35.382] Agata Soccini: I started with computer science because I felt like I want to see how things work. I found technology very magic. And then I wanted to do something between design and coding. And I realized that VR puts together many of my passions. So I do graphic design. I code, but not all the time. And I like it so far.
[00:12:00.509] Kent Bye: Great. Well, thank you.
[00:12:01.310] Agata Soccini: Thank you very much. See you later then.
[00:12:03.683] Kent Bye: And thank you for listening! If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash voicesofvr.
