"Who would like to share their results?" the presenter asks hopefully.
Ping raises her hand. "INTP," she says in a quiet, lightly accented voice.
The presenter beams. INTPs (people who, in Briggs-Myers parlance, tend toward introversion rather than extroversion, intuition rather than sensing, thinking rather than feeling, and perceiving rather than judging) seek to develop logical explanations for everything that interests them, he says. They are quiet, contained, flexible, and adaptable, and can focus in depth to solve problems in their area of interest. They are hungry to understand, control, predict, and explain.
"Scratch an INTP," the presenter concludes, "and you will find a scientist."
After a beat of impressed silence, he asks confidently, "Now, who wants to go next?" Forty hands shoot up, including that of Edelsbrunner. From within Ping Fu a true smile builds.
Rob Black operates out of an ordinary-looking cubicle at Geomagic headquarters in Research Triangle Park, an anomalous wedge of exurbia lying among the cities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, in the heart of North Carolina. RTP, as the area is locally known, is a place where high tech meets the traditional tobacco road, and gleaming business parks sprout among deep forests of loblolly pine. In 1998, Ping Fu chose to relocate here because Champaign-Urbana, Ill., Geomagic's birthplace, was so far removed from the tech boom's coastal capitals. At the time, in-demand programmers balked at moving to the Midwest cornfields, where, as Ping's former charge Mark Andreessen once complained, the odor of pig manure wafted through the halls of the University of Illinois's supercomputing center.
Black, a mechanical engineer, joined Geomagic in 1999, shortly after the move. He now serves as an account executive, demonstrating Geomagic Qualify and Geomagic Studio, the company's two core products, for customers.
"This is as accurate a model of that turbine as is humanly possible to render," Black says, nodding to the computer monitor in his cubicle, upon which the
3-D image of a component of a jet engine turbine slowly spins, in full color and precise scale, strikingly artful in its Andy Warhol-like artlessness. A few moments earlier, in an adjacent workroom, this image existed as a point cloud, a starburst of pixel light spilling across the black empty sky of another computer monitor. A laser scanner--a three-foot-long appendage-like device that resembles an X-ray machine at a hospital fracture clinic--shot out thousands of invisible beams, which struck the turbine at thousands of points over its variegated surface. The point cloud produced an impressionistic shadow image of the turbine; the turbine as if painted by Seurat.
Point clouds form a decisive step in the DSSP process, Black explains, and distinguish the technology from its cousin, computer-aided design and manufacturing, or CAD/CAM. In CAD/CAM, the designer creates the product, employing the software as a digitally enhanced pencil and drawing board. In DSSP, by contrast, the designer does not create. The image on the screen originates from the product itself, not the hand, brain, and eye of a human.
The next stage in the DSSP process is the creation of polygons. Thousands, multitudes, of tiny triangles form when Black clicks the mouse and each point in the cloud is instantly connected by a line to its two nearest neighbors. The triangles are then interconnected, forming a full-color second digital draft of the turbine.
The part spins on the screen in smooth, gleaming verisimilitude, accurate to within three-thousandths of a millimeter, ready for a range of design, manufacturing, and inspection applications.
The third phase of the process, and Geomagic's technological breakthrough, is the rapid creation of NURBS--non-uniform rational B-splines. NURBS create a smooth surface on the image, as if the object were perfectly shrink-wrapped. Before Geomagic, NURBS could not be created with a single click; it required a technique that tested the skills of topflight engineers and designers, working with the patience of monks copying illuminated manuscripts. Largely because of the laborious NURBS phase, it took a designer two full weeks to digitally process an object such as this turbine part. DSSP was too inconvenient and expensive to become standard practice in most industries.
But now, when Rob Black clicks the mouse, magic--or Geomagic--happens. A faint but furious humming issues from inside the processor. Black gives an expectant smile. He explains that this is the eighth edition of Geomagic Studio, which is used mainly for design and manufacturing purposes, and Qualify, which is principally used for inspection. Each new edition of the software represents a major improvement, closely connected to advances in the hardware. "When I first started here in '99 that scanner would have cost $200,000," Black says. "Today it costs $50,000, and it's 10 times more powerful and easier to use."
