2025-04-09 09:00:00
Reuben Kraft
Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering
Penn State University
Metaverse Mechanics
How the metaverse will save mechanics and mechanics will save the metaverse
As the metaverse begins to permeate our workplaces, classrooms, and social lives it can be a scary thought for many of us. However, with the metaverse brings refocus on computations and haptic feedback, areas of great expertise for our community. In addition, it will require new methods of computing, streamlined and rapid experimental measurements, and transition funnels or pipelines to make it all work. The metaverse will ignite new opportunities in computational and experimental mechanics that we should embrace. In fact, in many ways, most of us have been building small metaverses for many years, iterating between experimental (real-life) and computational worlds. Asking what is real, or what seems real.
In this talk, I will highlight some projects in the computational realm but more frequently are overlapping with concepts that will be found in the metaverse. Cloud-based serverless computing, machine learning, machine vision, particle-based mechanics and nonlinear solvers are all topics found in our profession that are fundamental to a successful metaverse. Specifically, I will discuss a new no-click on-demand platform for predicting brain injury, new computational methods for modeling penetration, body armor and the brain, and how we use machine learning to predict blast overpressures.
BIO: Reuben Kraft is an associate professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering at Penn State University. After earning his doctorate in mechanical engineering from Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Kraft spent four years at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and then one year at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Dr. Kraft has been at Penn State since 2013 and is a co-hire of Penn State’s Institute for Computational and Data Sciences. He is also affiliated with the Penn State Institute of the Neurosciences and Center for Neural Engineering. Dr. Kraft’s primary research interests are in computational biomechanics, high strain rate mechanics, and mechanobiology. Dr. Kraft was awarded the NSF CAREER and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) for his work in computational biomechanics.
