Recently I blogged about:

• Autodesk Gallery at One Market in San Francisco Exhibit: Lost and Found USS Arizona Exhibit

There's more to this story:

In addition to creating 3D-printed artifacts for the remaining survivors, the team created a virtual reality experience.

Augmented reality is an enhanced version of reality created by the use of technology to overlay digital information on an image of something being viewed through a device such as a camera on a smartphone. When the Yelp application overlays restaurant names on top of a smartphone's street view, that's augmented reality. On the other hand, virtual reality is an artificial world consisting of images and sounds created by a computer that is affected by the actions of a person experiencing it. Most first-person video games are examples of virtual reality. So unlike augmented reality, in virtual reality, everything is virtual instead of real.

Using the same data collected during the project, Enterprise Solutions Lead, Dave Tyner, and Senior User Experience Designer, Jeffrey Wilson, along with customer success managers and consulting teams created a USS Arizona Experience in virtual reality with Autodesk Stingray. Experience designers use the Stingray to create 3D games, real-time design visualizations, and stunning virtual reality experiences. Stingray connects directly to Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya, and Maya LT.

Without the immersive experience, you can't get the full effect, but you can get an idea regarding its creation from one of our internal videos. At the 9-minute mark, you can tour the ship as it existed before the attack.

Kelsey Stein from Autodesk customer, Skanska, delivered this experience to one of the survivors of Pearl Harbor, 95 year-old George Kondas. Kelsey is connected to George through her husband.

Throughout the video, George constantly remarked about how he's lucky to have lived long enough to see it again.

Autodesk was honored to be a part of this.

Virtual reality is alive in the lab.