2. PERA’s virtual reality centre cost £2 million using the latest Silicon Graphics technolog y.

How do you think it justified such an investment? Virtual reality, once seen solely as a high-technology arcade entertainment medium, has established itself as a powerful, three-dimensional professional design tool, with applications including architecture, car design and planning of delicate surgical operations. It gives designers a much clearer concept of the relative positions of the individual elements than is possible with static, two-dimensional representations. Perhaps even more importantly, it also allows others, in particular the ‘non-technically’ trained user, to visualize and suggest modifications to the design before any work is done on the physical entity concerned. An architect can allow a client to roam around the virtual building, walking along corridors and entering rooms at will. PERA, the European consultancy, R&D and a technology transfer company, uses a ‘virtual reality center’

to help its clients visualize the implications of their operations designs. Powered by a Silicon Graphics Onyx Infinite Reality supercomputer, the world’s most powerful graphics supercomputer, the centre offers visualizations of real-time data.