Posted: 4/25/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Allison Bulow After 10 years of research and experimentation, Alfred Hubler, associate professor of physics, has finally developed a way to synchronize reality with virtual reality, a state which he refers to as "mixed-reality."

University physicists have blurred the lines of reality by creating the first mixed-reality state, which could give rise to a range of applications, including the control of cancer cells.

Alfred Hubler, associate professor of physics and head of the experiment , created the mixed-reality state through an experiment with two pendulums: one real and the other a virtual representation on a computer.

"Our experiment coupled a real system with a virtual-reality system," Hubler said.

By making the two objects as similar to each other as possible, Hubler said he was able to get the two initially independent motions of the two pendulums to instantaneously move in tandem.

This created a mixed-reality state, a system in which two objects - one from the real world and one from the virtual world - mimic each other's actions because of some kind of similarity, called "coupling."

"(This experiment) is the first evidence of a mixed-reality state," Hubler said.

While Hubler's experiment is the first to couple objects in two different realities, it is a modern take on an age-old science curiosity: Huygens' clock experiment.

"When you put two mechanical clocks on the wall, the clocks become coupled through faint vibrations through the wall," Hubler said. "If the clocks are almost identical but slightly different, even though they initially show different times, they will at some point move together (and display the same time)."

The clocks would not synchronize gradually, however; they would instantaneously switch to display the same time. But when the clocks synchronize, they would continue moving together, and an observer would not be able to tell the slow clock from the fast clock.

Likewise, in Hubler's pendulum experiment, it is not known which pendulum, virtual or real, has matched the other. Since there is no reference as to which pendulum has copied which, the boundary between the virtual world and the real world becomes unclear. The pendulums become essentially indistinguishable from each other.

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