AIM, formerly known as the Stanford Integrated Manufacturing Association, is a campus-based joint venture initiated by Stanford's Graduate School of Business and School of Engineering and several large corporate partners to promote the exchange of technical ideas between academia and industry. The Computer Forum is a similar alliance of Stanford's Computer Science Department and Computer Systems Laboratory and a large group of industrial affiliates. Computer modeling of soft objects has important applications in fields like medicine, said Joel Brown, a Stanford computer science graduate student working under Kevin Montgomery and Michael Stephanides, respectively the technical and medical directors of the National Biocomputation Center at the Stanford Medical School. In the field of microsurgery, which involves the suturing of small blood vessels under a microscope, training is crucial. In contrast to non-recyclable lab rats, he continued, computer simulations allow surgeons to practice an operation again and again.
Rigid objects are easier to model than soft ones.
Brian Mirtich of Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs described new algorithms for detecting collisions in virtual environments and showcased them with a video representation of hundreds of variously shaped simulated gemstones colliding repeatedly as they tumbled down an inclined tray. Mirtich acknowledged that bringing the speed up to real time requires more work. Even stationary structures, when they get complex enough, can be difficult and expensive to model. A realistic simulation of these subs requires the generation of 850,000 polygons, observed Dinesh Manocha, a University of North Carolina computer scientist. An automobile has about 20,000 parts, a commercial airplane 5 million, Manocha said.