Virtual Reality and Engineering.

• Author: ESS, CHARLIE

Burgeoning technology takes the headaches and cost out of facility design.

It's a long road from concept to completion. Ask any engineer who has ever sat down at the drafting table to lay out a facility. Canneries and fish hatcheries are complex, as are gas turbine generator plants and oil exploration modules. But changing technology-the addition of virtual reality to present engineering software packages-has come to take the wind out of the old adage, "back to the drawing board."

It's not that engineers won't do a little head scratching in the years to come, but laying out facilities with the aid of virtual reality on the computer promises to preempt foibles of the past. It used to be that a team of engineers would draw up an oilrig in 2D then erect labor-intensive plastic models to measure their mistakes. And veteran planners will admit there were plenty.

"You'd have four to six people standing around, wanting to correct the fact that a pipe is going to run right through a steel beam," says Mike Shelton, owner and founder of Anchorage-based Virtual Facility Engineering and Design. "With this system you're already looking at the problem on your desk, where you can fix it."

The system he's talking about is his own, a package that includes a blend of 3-D computer software, support-and tutoring services for the engineers who use it. That and access to a printer that produces a plastic model to scale for final review. Shelton cut his teeth on the new technology in the design of three Alpine modules destined for the North Slope last year, then went on to form VFED with his wife and business partner, Marla, last July.

Blending the Technologies

In some ways the technology is nothing new. With degrees in mechanical and petroleum engineering, Shelton has used 3-D engineering programs extensively since the early 1980s and broadened his expertise to include training other engineers in the use of AutoCad, a popular program. (He also teaches engineering as an adjunct professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage.)

But the 3-D programs of the past had their limits. Moving parts that passed muster within the drawings would collide after Shelton and his colleagues had assembled the model.

That engineers were forced back to the drawing board was to be expected, Shelton says, because they were required to build facilities in dimensions different from what can be rendered on a flat piece of paper. "Three-D drawings ask the user to extrapolate in another...