Christine Odenwald has virtually seen the future.
Over the course of a 12-month internship at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, Odenwald worked on a half-dozen projects related to virtual reality or augmented reality.
Early on, she helped shape a visualization that produced an astronaut’s-eye-view of a Langley science instrument mounted on the International Space Station.
By strapping on a headset, viewers could see the SAGE III (Stratospheric Aerosol Gas Experiment III) instrument as if they were taking a daring spacewalk outside the station.
“I got that visualization done in like the first month of my internship,” Odenwald said. “We had a bunch of public outreach events using that, getting people excited about VR because it is the future. And you can quote me on that.
“It’s seems clear that it’s going to be an increasing part of our lives.”
Growing up in nearby Chesapeake, Odenwald figured she would be a math teacher one day, not a virtual reality specialist.
Her older brother dreamed of becoming an engineer, but it was Christine who landed an internship at NASA Langley in the spring of 2017.
And today, she’s a 20-year-old modeling, simulation and visualization engineering major at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, while her brother teaches math in Roanoke.
“We kind of flipped,” Odenwald said, smiling. “I feel like we both kind of inspired each other.”
The Virginia Aerospace Science and Technology Scholars (VASTS) Program provided encouragement for both the young Odenwalds. As high schoolers, they attended separate sessions of that summer educational program at NASA Langley, run by the Virginia Space Grant Consortium.
“That motivated me to kind of see what this field was about and it turned out to be an excellent fit for me,” Christine said.
She gets high marks from folks she assisted during her internship.
“Working with Christine, I was immediately impressed with her ability to jump into software and hardware she’d never used before and get things working quickly,” said Joshua Kinne, a project manager in NASA Langley’s Science Flight Project Office. “I was even more impressed by how well she communicated the work she’d produced, no matter if the audience was a member of the public or a senior researcher who’d actually worked on the SAGE III project.”
Odenwald said her year at NASA was beneficial in many ways.
“Obviously, I am a better technical developer now, but, also, I’ve become such a better public speaker,” she said. During the internship, Odenwald was asked to be a presenter at a conference that included representatives from Johns Hopkins University and Newport News Shipbuilding. “I may be coming in like I’m young, I’m still a student, I’m still an intern, but I had a lot more confidence in myself and it’s definitely something that I gained from this experience.”
Throughout the year, the virtual reality and augmented reality assignments kept coming.
This spring, near the end of her internship, Odenwald was part of a team of interns that developed the M3 Multi-User Model Manipulation Tool. Using a content creation engine called Unity, Odenwald worked with interns including Dakota Palmer and Marcelino Dayrit to create a tool allowing engineers to upload their concepts so they could see and manipulate 3D versions of their designs for things like aircraft, spacecraft, satellites or atmospheric sensing instruments.
The goal is for multiple contributors to see and manipulate the model simultaneously to better collaborate on the design.
“They’re able to move, scale, rotate the object,” Odenwald said. “They’re able to see what’s called exploded views. So, they click a button on a controller and then all the individual parts of the CAD (computer-aided design) objects will expand.”
The goal is rapid prototyping where different subject matter experts in different fields can instantly compare notes.
“Maybe they have different perspectives and they can see something that might be out of place for their particular expertise,” Odenwald said. “Boom, now they’ve identified a problem.”
Virtual reality projects like this have potential to help NASA become more agile and efficient.
“I feel like it’s kind of changing the status quo, right?” Odenwald said. “That’s awesome. It’s an amazing feeling.”