NSF Award
2126534
Part 1. Nontechnical description<br/>The COVID-19 pandemic has forced international collaborations, as part of science and engineering research and education, to move to remote communication using Zoom and other platforms. The ultimate goal of this EAGER proposal is to design, implement, and test a novel, immersive, cloud-based platform that will facilitate international collaborations of researchers and allow them to interactively perform remote experiments. The platform will immerse remote participants into a holistic virtual environment imitating an actual facility where they can interactively perform authentic experiments using digital equipment. Real-time teamwork is facilitated by synchronizing digital equipment and processes on participants’ devices. Incorporated augmented reality (AR) through wearable Smart Glasses enables partners to combine synchronous group work with asynchronous individual exploration. The project involves foreign partners from Mexico, Australia, United Kingdom, Russia and Africa.<br/>U.S. scientists and students of diverse cultural, ethnical, educational and language backgrounds will work as teams with their foreign counterparts exploring the efficiency, applicability and scalability of the pilot platform. The collaboration will initially cover education and research on applications of X-Ray diffraction methods for studying nanostructures and dynamics of macromolecules. This materials research area is of interest for many other science and engineering disciplines and domains. <br/>The envisioned idea represents high risk/high pay-off exploratory work in its early stages on untested concepts as such a platform currently does not exist. Should it succeed it will be a real game-changer in distant international collaboration by essentially lifting the difference between an in-person and remote online collaboration. The platform combines the most advanced features of videoconferencing, group computer games, flight and race simulators, and augmented and mixed reality into a single system. This way, international collaboration will become global and fast, relevant and meaningful, efficient and scalable.<br/><br/>Part 2. Technical description<br/>The project will innovatively integrate current and emerging telecommunication and computer technologies into a futuristic collaborative platform that incorporates numerous innovations. The most significant of them are: (i) orchestrating an interactive teamwork of the partners from different countries by synchronizing simulated virtual processes and digital equipment operations on their devices; (ii) connecting digital equipment with science/engineering modeling software; (iii) combining synchronized performance of experiment as a group member with individual exploration and skills training using augmented reality objects; (iv) connecting and synchronizing interactive augmented reality (AR) objects, provided through Smart Glasses, with relevant virtual processes simulated by cloud-based software objects and presented on a computer or smartphone screen; (v) connecting and synchronizing digital and physical equipment; (vi) integrating automated project and collaboration tools/features with video conferencing; and (vii) real-time voice translation. <br/>The efficiency, applicability, and scalability of the proposed system is instrumental for connecting scientists and students of different cultural and educational backgrounds, and for facilitating their work as a team. The project platform technology has a great potential to dramatically change the way scientists and engineers collaborate internationally as well as student participate in educational and exchange programs. Being developed and tested for the specific area of studying crystal structures, the technology and approach can be easily generalized and expanded and applied to virtually all science and engineering domains.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
