May 6, 2014

Virtual though it may be, the rainbow of colors suddenly available to students in the Automotive Technology Program at Amarillo College has at its end a bona fide pot of gold.

It’s in the form of a newly acquired paint-booth simulator valued at $26,000—a high-tech tool on which students can practice the colorful application process on any number of virtual vehicles without dispensing a single drop of actual paint.

The device arrived midway through the spring semester courtesy of a Perkins Basic Grant and swiftly made a curricular impact.

“This is the best simulator of its kind on the market,” Brian Jacob, coordinator of the Automotive Technology Program, said. “Our students love it. They’d be on it all day long if we let them.”

Whomever has the good fortune to operate the simulator wears a head-mounted three-dimensional-display unit and wields a hand-held “sprayer” with an adjustable nozzle that virtually dispatches any color under the sun.

Whichever vehicle or portion of a vehicle the operator sees through the head display—it might be located in a painting booth or in a windy outdoor setting, whatever the unit has been programed to simulate—can also be viewed on a screen by instructors and fellow students.

The computer logs the effort and evaluates it, even tabulating the amount of paint wasted by overspray.

“It is utterly realistic,” Eddie Casias, instructor of automotive collision technology, said. “In fact, it is probably a little more difficult to master than being in an actual painting booth. If you can learn to do a good paint job on the simulator, you’ll be able to do a very good job for real.”

Meanwhile, if practice makes perfect, students can practice all they want on the simulator without going through gallons of pricy auto-body paint and do so in a clean, environmentally friendly environment.

Word of the Program’s new acquisition was swift to get around; representatives of local industry have already made contact with AC in hopes of getting a demonstration.

Because AC’s Career and Technical Education Program is all about putting people to work through industry partnerships, those requests are being granted.