Aspiration from Balarina to VR Pioneer

Carolina Cruise-Nera is proof of how far “Plan B” can take you. Growing up, she was firm to become a professional ballet dancer. But after injury, her ballet dreams ended, Cruz-Neera became a pioneer of virtual-reality technology.

On a computer science professor University of central fluorida In his nearly 40 years of career, he has also developed VR equipment for diverse fields in the form of medical research and defense.

Unlike many engineers, however, Cruz-Nera was very little interest in technology as a child. When her dreams of a career in ballet ended before graduating from the university, she returned to the technical skill she was developing and started working as a software engineer. But his heart was not in it – until an introduction to the VR technology closed it on a new trajectory.

“I found that I can work with a computer system in real time that was very visible and in touch with your users, as a dancer you are in contact with your audience,” she says.

born to Dance

Cruise-Neera’s childhood was divided between Spain, where she was born, and Venezuela, where her parents ran a fashion import business. She started ballet classes at the age of three, and as long as Cruz-Nera was a teenager, she was spending two or three hours every evening at the dance studio. “I always placed my ballet shoes in my ballet,” she says. “Even if I was in school, I was dancing around the hallway.”

His determination to fill any free time with ballet, combined with a natural ability to mathematics and science, pushed it to study more technical subjects. “I could do mathematics homework in 10 minutes, but if I had to read a book and write an essay, it would take me hours,” she says. “So I went to science and engineering just because I needed more time in dance studios.”

Cruise-Neera was determined to make her career in the ballet, but her father encouraged her to get a bachelor’s degree as a backup. He told him that computer was future and encouraged him to study system engineering Brahmanta In Karakas, where he enrolled in 1982.

Dreams crushed

At the age of 21 in 1986, Cruise-Neera broke her knee in a skiing accident, ending hopes of becoming a professional Balarina. The news was disastrous, she says, but in the same year she started as a trainee in the Venezuela company Teleprovanka, who provided computing services to big corporations. Cruise-Neera co-praised the following year and infected in a full-time position as a software architect.

He excelled in the role and was promoted from intern to manager in less than two years. But he got very little pleasure in it. “She was a very deep time in my life,” she says. “I was almost like a robot that was just working mechanically.”

In this application of the cave, researchers use a digital twin to study the design of a new zoo pavilion. Emerging Analytics Center/Arkansas University in Little Rock

Nevertheless, he continued to develop his technical skills. In 1989, she won a scholarship to study in the United States and enrolled in a master’s program. University of Illinois Chicago To study electrical engineering and computer science. The first year of Cruise-Neera was spent in learning English and taking courses in subjects such as database, networking and parallel computing.

But in his second year he discovered the university Electronic visualization laboratory-A joint program introduced by engineering and art departments for a time focused on computer graphics and computer animation. There, Cruz-Nera finally discovered a way to connect his technical skills with his artistic passion.

She says, “When I started getting inspired again and started getting excited about what I was doing,” She says. It was a very stimulating atmosphere. ”

Cave

The thesis of the master of Cruise-Neera focused on using interactive 3D graphics to submit financial data. When she graduated in 1991, she briefly worked with IBM developing data-vizulization tools for stockbrokers on Wall Street. But he also found the corporate structure restrictive. She says, “I felt like a racecher, which was tied from behind the stable, because I had all these views, but had to stay at the point on the project,” she says.

A few months in the job, his master’s program advisor offered to take him as PhD. Students in the electronic visualization laboratory, an opportunity that he could not pass. Just before starting its PhD in August 1991, Cruise-Neera participated in a special interest group on computer graphics and interactive techniques (Siggraph) The conference, which had an exhibition of early VR equipment. He immediately fell in love with technology. She says, “You can really keep a person in the middle of the world in the digital world where you can imagine a computer.

But he found that cumbersome initial VR headset limited the experiences of the types that could be created. The opportunity discovery of some old industrial projector in one of the university’s storage rooms inspired him for a completely new approach.

Cruise-Neera first unveiled the cave at the 1992 Siggraph Conference, while chasing PhD. Carolina Cruise-Nera

He tilted machines to the graphics workstation manufactured by silicon graphics and used them to project a virtual atmosphere on the bedsheets tapped on the walls. His professors loved this idea, and Cruz-Nera started Cave to develop an automatic virtual environmentReferred to the recurrent brief cave.

a year later, In 1992He unveiled the first version of the cave in Siggraph. Users wearing synchronized stereoscopic glass with projector changed the 2D images displayed in 3D graphics on the walls. A motion-capture system also detects the orientation of the wearer, which makes it possible to continuously customize estimates to fit the user’s approach.

From art to science

Cruise-Nera spent the rest of his PhD. The system continues to develop. She says that the project was inspired by the desire to allow groups of people to share artistic and creative experiences, but they quickly realized its widespread ability. She says that it can also be used as a collaborative place for science or engineering.

For example, he worked with Argane National Laboratory to develop a cave system Allowed biologists to interact with molecular dynamics simulationThe project helped researchers to accelerate the development of new drugs for the treatment of AIDS, which was then a death sentence. This is one of the projects that Cruise-Nera is the most proud.

In new versions of the cave system, cruise-neira such as heptic gloves here allow users to feel virtual items.Varalab/Central Florida University

Your Ph.D. In 1995, he did a cofound Virtual reality application center But Iowa state universityAnd since then UCF has held positions in many American universities including its current professorship.

For years, his work has become widespread, saying Cruise-Nera. She now creates software for real -time information manipulation in diverse fields in the form of energy, pharmaceuticals and finances. Her group is “performance unknowable”, she says, so they work with all types of equipment, including cave, VR headset and standard monitor.

Currently most of his attention is on “digital twins”-dynamic virtual copies of object world items that can be used for simulation and testing. Despite the enthusiasm around this technique, Cruise-Nera says it is actually a development of ideas he was using in his molecular dynamics simulation in the 90s.

“It was a digital twin of a molecular system,” she says about her previous project. “It was simulation, it had interaction, it had real -time interrelations with many other systems. Therefore, in a sense, we are not going to new areas. We are developing over time.”

But he has not forgotten his roots. Cruise-Neera still regularly regularly staging interactive experiences in theaters, museums and art galleries with caves and other systems, and he recently manufactured a dance performance. “I still keep in touch with my more artistic side,” she says.