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U.S. Army Developing Prototype Holodeck
Our friend, Anonymous Coward, wrote in to tell us that the U.S. Army is developing what it calls the 'Cave Automatic Virtual Environment'. The facilities use 3d video and various forms of projection technology to create a virtual, interactive environment. Note the recursive acronym. (The story's in the February issue of Popular Science.)
Yeah, let's go in there and stomp those monkey-boys back to the Stone Age! Yeah! We're the USA! Nobody messes with us! YEAH!!! Do you realize how foolish you sound?
fufme
Yeah! GOD BLESS THE USA!
We're God's CHOSEN PEOPLE! No-one deserves to live without our approval! Anybody who says different is going to get a couple of pounds of lead plugged in their ass!
GO USA!!!!
You Americans are funny.
They did not. The academic world did.
"being in the postion to lose one is a worse thing. if this can help keep our troops safe than God bless it!" yea! after all, who gives a fuck about thousands of lives being lost in sensless squabbles, if it's profitable for the good-'ol god fearin' USofA well then who cares about everyone else! As long as it keeps our oh-so precious troops safe well then we had better do it, cu'z we're right ALL THE TIME!! heh. could you be anymore ethnocentric and naively patriotic?
'They may just apear as images on a scope but in your mind you know that thier is a living being on the recieving end of the weopon you just deployed. They have a mother maybe a wife and kids they are a person just like you...'
so you dont really care because you killed them anyway, right? great! what a good obedient coward you are!
Not only has it been around at UIUC, someone HAS written the Quake engine for it. I know that's not as impressive as QII or QIII, but it is kinda cool to be looking at an enemy that is taller than you, with his gun right at your nose. I don't remember who wrote it though. I got to see it through ACM's SigGraph, and it was amazing. When you jumped, the character jumped. When you crouched, the character crouched. He even put in support for peeking around corners without walking around them. All you had to do was move your body like you actually peeking. Good stuff.
Look at the risques involved in training excersizes like people driving off cliffs, running jets dead into the ground, new recruits shooting each other in target practice. Most of it is low key in the media but I remember reports of all sorts that make me think that this is a great idea to get our "soldiers" up to fighting par without killing them in the proccess. It would be nicer to find out you aren't great at climbing cliffs in a simulator than when you loose your grip at the top of a mountain and fall 1000 feet. I don't think any of this technology has been linked in a way that dissociates peoples psychies from the reality of war but it does help prepair them to better perform and possibly come out of it alive.
http://www.pdc.kth.se/pro jects/vr-cube/photo-gallery.html
you make it sound as if the united states only engages in war to 'protect' others where war has already borken out or where systematized opression is occuring(acting like the worlds policeman)(eg. kosovo). that would be great if all the US did was this sort of 'charity' fighting for other parts of the world but guess what, we fight wars for oil and socio/economic reasons as well.
remind me again who we were keeping safe and 'saving' in vietnam?
uhhhh i don't know what YOU'RE talking about since the previous post had nothing to do with your reply's content. also the extent of the genocide in WWII germany wasn't exposed untill AFTER THE WAR WAS OVER, genius. it wasnt like the US had a decision to make about wether or not to enter the war based on the ethnic clensing the nazi party was doing, it had no idea at that time. And who made the United States the superior 'moral oracle' of the world? it's AWFULLY presumptuous AND condescending of you to think that the USA knows whats best for everyone else on earth!
yeah it's a shame that more people like you 'in the real world' don't know what trying to treat other humans HUMANELY(what a concept), is all about.
'course who cares about that?! if my Commanding Officer tells me to do it, well then KILL KILL KILL! 'cuz it's ok then, right?
ugh, god i want to get out of here! can i come to canada pleeeeease? everyone here wants to kill eachother.
Yeah, get those "Khay-mer Roo-ja", huh?
It's spelt Khmer Rouge, moron. And the U.S. had exactly zero to do with stopping them. Try studying some world history between your brainwash sessions in front of the TV.
or in GEB by Hofstadter..
:)
GOD: God over Djinn
You know why? 'Cause there's too many people like you around.
Perhaps not, but those damn Canadians are preparing to attack *us*! Why, just yesterday I heard Bo Gritz over shortwave informing us that 300,000 communist Canadian troops were massing at our border!
Is it any coincidence that the would-be bomber Ressam entered the US through Canada. Wake Up America! The Canadian Menace must be stopped!
"...who made the United States the superior 'moral oracle' of the world?"
Larry Ellison is a crook!
Poor baby.
Degrassi Junior High makes Baywatch look like fine culture.
The episode where the crew went back to robinhood times wasn't on the holodeck, Q transported them back so Picard could prove his love for Vash. I think that's why he did it, anyway.
Of course, if you are not referring to that Episode then this will make no sense.
yea i DO agree with that
I humbly suggest you move to a nation that has not benefited from the existence of the US military.
"Computer, begin Natalie Portman simulation. Increase hot grits content by 300%."
it's pretty pathetic that you can see no other alternative to international conflict than war. sorry for having ideas of my own and not being the 'automaton ideal' that eats up the propaganda i was fed about this being the best country on earth.
Are you in Mexico?
Ahh, but this is the fundemental difference between the psychology of people in the USA and everywhere else on the planet.
The Chinese were enslaved by the mongols.
The Britons had to deal with the Romans and then later with the Normans.
Being beaten to a pulp and living under someone else's heel is a common cultural experience. It encourages you to mind your own buisness and to only become involved if there is a good reason.
Except for the USA. You still have yet to experience this important, formative, cultural event. Doubtless, once it happens, you'll settle down and let everyone else sort things out for themselves.
Think about it.
yeah great metaphor between major league baseball and international relations. another thing about americans is if you dont understand it, just make it into a catchy little saying involving sports somehow!(eg. three strikes and your out) bravo, a tribute to blind patriotism and morons everywhere.
I also hope they don't run Windows 98, but I'm ambivalent over this whole "invading Canada" issue.
Can anyone provide some examples of positive or negative effects of invading Canada?
Thank you.
I work at the NASA base in Langley, Va and we work with the guys who have a cave here. It's not -THAT- cool and there are many installations of these things all over the country. Our's is intended for visualization of data coming from the EOSDIS sattelite program. We played Quake2 in it.
PopSci is basically trying to equate a quad-headed SGI box with a holodeck. This is like comparing a zoo to the entire continent of Africa. Not quite in the same ballpark.
mm...........................................:(..y es
One of the most fiercly argued points concerning WWII is how far Hitler would have ever gotten if it wasn't for the active support of western governments.
Hitlers concordat(SP?) with the Vatican was a major boost to his international prestige.
In 1938 Winston Churhill had nothing but praise for the man who was to become his deadly enemy less than a year later.
While where digging over history, do you have any idea of who it was that helped the Japanese to build the navel fleets that wipped out pearl harbour? Why none other than Uncle Sam himself.
During the 1930's, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were seen by the western world as a bulwark against soviet communism.
After WWII, the CIA and other US agencies were instrumental in placing despotic dictators in control around the world on the same basic premise - that they would stop the spread of communism.
Do you remember the Shah of Iran? Who do you think put the Somoza family in control of Nicuragua? Who backed Marcos in the philipines?
If you can't understand why the international community sometimes takes an attitude of "you made this mess - you clean it up!" to the USA, then you really need to spend some more time studying the history of the twentieth centuary.
look at canada. we have virtually no military, we don't go around on the world stage bullying people
And why don't you have a military?
1. You can't afford it. Canadian soldiers (who do, by the way go around the world very often as "peacekeepers" (i.e. armed soldiers holding off other people with guns) are poorly treated. They live in worse conditions that very poor people. Little heat, rat-infested barracks, and no parts for your weapons. so that you have to cannabalize every time something breaks. BTW, Canadian peacekeepers generally go more places, armed, than American peacekeepers.
2. Who would dare attack you with the U.S. next door? No one. On the east, you have U.S.-U.K. fleets protecting you, south is the U.S. proper, and westward is Alaska with its many military outposts. You are totally protected by U.S. military might, and yet you mock it. Simply put, no one attacks Canada because the U.S. doesn't permit it.
An American in Canada
LINUX: Linux Is Not Unix eXactly
For your information, prior to launching his attack on Kuwait, Saddam Hussein requested a diplomatic meeting with the American ambassador. He asked point blank as to how the USA would react to such an invasion. The ambassador assured him that the USA didn't give a damn.
In short, it was a major screw up in US diplomacy that casued the gulf-war. This is not a matter of conjecture, but of verifyable historical fact.
As to the furthur details of their conversation and whatever special deals were worked out concerning the USA's kickback in oil prices, that's something that isn't available in the public records.
Nah, only those evil Americans hope for things like that...
Everyone is looking for their "golden oportunity". It's just that at this point in history, the USA is a little bit more blatent about it than the rest of us ;)
Arguments of morality/democracy/justice are essentially the sugar coating that is used to make such activities more palatable to the public. In the final analysis, it's about the aquisition and control of available resources.
The truth is like hooker - if you have the bucks you can have her for an hour or two, but you can never own her.
This is the fundemental flaw in your argument concerning Kuwait. As a result of the failure of the US ambassador to state that the USA would object to the invasion, then using you terms, your argument really translates as
"Damn doctor. My mother goes in for a regular checkup and as a result of the doctors incompetence she is left in a critical condition in the hospital. So of course he operates ( for free ) to save her life to save himself from a malpractice suit rather than out of any concern for my mother. Selfish bastard."
It would be nice if they shot Bill Gates though ;)
>How long will it take before they start
:(
>representing "targets" as icons rather than real
>video? "I just wiped out three of those blinking
>blue squares - what do you suppose they were?"
Not likely to happen. I'd say that one of the
perceived advantages of such a system is that
it would help to desensitize soldiers to the
gore. Start them out with blue squares and,
over the course of a few months, let them work
their way up to what look like and die like
humans. Then conscience(sp) shouldn't be as much
of a problem when they hit the real battelfield.
Yes, it's sick, but who said war wasn't sick.
pacifism sure does sound nice, until someone is pointing a gun at your head.
Negative effect: they might come down and set fire to the white house.
Positive effect: will stop OpenBSD exporting strong encryption to the world.
Virginia Tech has been working on a project called the CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment for several years now. Are we the first to build a CAVE? Check out http://www.cave.vt.edu
"Nay," responded The Khan, "to crush your enemies, to see them fall at your feet - to take their horses and goods and hear the lamentation of their women. That is best."
In response to a question asked at dinner about what people thought was the best thing in the world.
By the way, The Kahn ruled from the Pacific Ocean in China to Poland, from India to Kamchatka His empire was the largest in the history of the world.
If his son hadn't been so weak and spoiled the Empire could have defeated the entire earth.
heh, the fact that you incorectly spelled peace speaks volumes.
OH MY GOD THE US ARMY IS BEAMING DOWN THEIR STORM TROOPS HERE TO CRUSH THE RESISTENCE!!!! NO!!!!!!! GOD DAMN IT THEY'RE EVERYWHERE MAN!!!! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD MAN DO SOMETHING BEFORE THEY KILL US ALL!!!!!
for bruising their knuckles?
When they are anally raping your wife will you go get the lubricating jelly so that their penises won't get raw?
Of course you wouldn't. And that is why you are a hypocrite. You say one thing and do another.
: How far away are we from being able to have
: a Matrix-like plug in the back of our heads?
Difficult to say. We have functional, if low resolution and monochrome visual cortex implants, and a very basic ability to have a computer respond usefully to trained brain impulses. Call it thermionic valve equivalent.
That should progress pretty fast. It's the raw processing power that a complete virtual world will require that's the real killer, however you plug yourself in.
the navy has developed a revolutionary gritsdeck, to be located right above the poopdeck. it will be dedicated to the pouring of grits down ones's sailor bellbottoms. thank you.
And if you have to clamour up the backs of innocent people to "get somewhere," then by all means, do it! No one likes a loser, right?
And that someone would be you, of course.
Americans, please, read this. Think about it. Over and over. It is the road to sanity.
I hope you're kidding...
Just because BillG does some stuff with software that you don't approve of doesn't mean he needs to be shot!
Hm. I always thought WINE stood for 'WINE is not efficient'.
"remind me again who we were keeping safe and 'saving' in vietnam?"
I believe the Vietnam war was fought to deter the spread of communism. The original communist doctrines were pretty clear in saying they wanted to crush any and all other social models. I think this conflicts with US national interests. Even though it appears that the US 'lost' the Vietnam war I think that the main mission goals were accomplished (i.e. I can still vote). Then again the Vietnam war can be looked at as just another battle in World War III. It seems like the US is doing OK overall with that war. We've already bankrupted the USSR, only have China to go now really. The US military isn't nearly as effivtive a tool for world control as some of our other more subtle assets we employ. I Dream of Jeanie and Levi Strauss had more to do with the Soviet collapse than the deployment of any troops. Really we're not out to get everyone. Just the ones out to get us.
Posted by someone quite proud to be a US citizen.
That's the spirit. This is exactly the kind of tech we need to insure that the US continues to maintain the most sophisticated military force in the world. I want to be able to strike any target anywhere in the world within 30 minutes and completely decimate their populace. I'm not talking panzy nuclear weapons here.. that shit drifts on the wind and could hurt *us* or our troops. What I'm talking about is robotic nanites parachutes from high orbiting satellites that could strike out against any agressor nation and completely destroy them. How you say? Why.. these nanites could be told to go into any biological organism and start reproducing. First they would start by taking over key functions of the human brain, movement, speech, feeling, etc. Then they would move on to other parts of the body through the bloodstream to begin replicating mechanical super weapons like lasers and probing tools. Finally they will march to the capital of the agressor nation and destroy those in power by injecting nanites into the evil bad guys which will turn them into "drones" as well. (One would assume the bad guys would be protected against the nanite assault from space so we would need drones on the ground to break into their secret lair first and THEN infect them. What country on earth would not fall to their knees and worship us in the face of such an awesome spectacle of power? We have the technology! We have the willpower! We have the funding! I suggest starting on a small backward country like Russia or China as our first test.
"look at canada. we have virtually no military" :) Mexico on the other hand, I'm not so sure how fast we'd get there.
Gee, who are your neighbors again? bwahaha. Hey we got the largest unprotected borders in the world between us, you don't think that doesn't send a message? We *are* on pretty good terms with one and another. Oh yeah BTW you're welcome for all the government spending you guys are saving by using the US military to deter foreign invasions. I mean c'mon! You think the US would idly stand by and let someone invade Canada? Sure maybe our 'rapid deployment' force would take a month to get it's act together, but we'd get there eventually.
"It's pretty pathetic that you can see no other alternative to international conflict than war."
It's a widely held belief that the diplomatic process that ensued at the outset of World War II actually prolonged the conflict. It gave the Germans time to fortify their positions, and build up their war machine. Think about this before you stick another flower into a gun barrel. Kill it before it grows!
Uhm....
Does anybody realize that this isn't new technology? SGI invented the CAVE concept about 4 years ago. If anybody wants, I can post a reference to the Innovations^3 magazine that first featured it.
The Cave was developed at the EVL at University of Illinois. Brown may have one, but they didn't create it.
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/VR/cavernus/QUAKE/Quake.h tml I've played it...yes, it's very very cool.
The one at NCSA (at UIUC) has those seems, but when a program starts up, you can't tell that they're there. In fact, if your not careful, you can walk into a wall.
Here's a link to the folks who have been doing this for a few years:
;-)
http://www.evl.uic.edu/EVL/VR/
I came across this while researching the ultimate Quake(TM) environment. One (some?) of the students in this group had ported Quake to this environment. The photos posted to their web site probably don't do justice to life-size, immersive Quake
I saw a comment on slashdot recently about the Holographic PDA Project. You can find the comment here.
It looks like the brain boys in the military have been spending time watching The Outer Limits. I remember an episode with Mark Hamill involving the creation of a virtual environment for comatose patients to allow a doctor to see what was going on inside. Funny, it was also called CAVE.
Actually, I think it is pretty swell that 1.4 million Americans (plus reservists) have voluntarily sworn to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. I sleep better at night for their service.
In a real war situation, you inevitable get something like My Lai - your "moral and honorable people" suddenly do kill defenseless women and children.
Actually, there's nothing inevitable about situations like that.
And this danger is infinitely magnified by technology, because now, you suddenly just have to push a little red button to condemn a million people to death, slow and gruesome for most of them. And all it takes for you is just a little vlountary shortsightedness.
The military today is interested in improving the ability to hit what they're aiming at and minimize collateral damage to the things around it. There is an increasing reluctance to use weapons of mass destruction. What you talk about here is a Cold-War Era discussion which probably should be relegated to the backburner in light of more relevant military issues today.
Hey moderators! It's a fine line between insightful and deluded. Also, a score of 4? Virtualizing war and desensitizing soldiers has been the naive weenie's complaint about modern war ever since guided weapons were invented. This Monkey got a score of 4 for taking an easily debunked complaint and adding some fairly witless snide remarks.
They outta get with the program and run that thing from an 800 MHz Athlon, a TNT2 Ultra or geForce, and XF86 4.0. That sucker would haul and cost next to nothing. Nothing good can come from outdated, closed source systems.
Redhat, nVidia, and AMD/Athlon... it's pretty easy to see how we're smoking the Onyx with XFree86 4.0. And it can only get better with our open source. Lets see someone try to fix an SGI bug in IRIX! Hah! Lets see someone try to use the latest nVidia board on an SGI! Hah! Gotta love the post-SGI era!!
Gee, maybe the spell checker on slashdot isn't working right.
They've got a recursive acronym! :-D
I'm glad to see a lot of people didn't buy that this was the Army's invention. Quite a few remember that the first CAVE was at EVL, but I just think it's more important to remember who was responsible rather than where they work. The CAVE was Carolina Cruz-Neira's Ph.D. project, so I think she deserves some mention in this talkback. See ISU's VRAC page.
Chapter and verse: The CAVE (CAVE Audio-Visual Environment, also Costly And Very Expensive) was invented at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at the University of Illinois at Chicago (not Chambana) by Tom DeFonti, Dan Sandin, and their grad students. Most of the initial work was done in the late 80's and early 90's. I used a working version in fall of 1992.
The thing used to run on some pretty high-end SGI equipment (Onyx and the like) and requires Barca-type projectors for each wall/floor. In other words, the thing ain't cheap.
DeFanti is also one of the co-directors of the NCSA at UIUC, so one of the first CAVEs outside of UIC was at UIUC for experimentation in visulaization and remote collaboration environments.
As one of DeFanti's grad students once said: "Virtual Reality: The science of illusion, the illusion of science."
Well, it was convenient that freeing Kuwait also affected oil ownership. But you have to admit that invading a neighboring country is a wee bit blatant way to take control of it. For some reason it greatly concerned the neighbors.
Why do you think Canadian soldiers are poorly treated? They're able to live in worse conditions than your weak, spoiled so-called soldiers. They don't need heat. They can eat their rats right out of the toaster. They don't carry around parts for weapons because they can simply make the parts they need -- that's what their big knife is for. Of course they go more places than those Americans with their fancy maps.
A Knight was the equivalent of a tank, but as clumsy as one. Pikemen were the obvious solution (30-foot spear stuck in ground) until the English/Viking longbow appeared and was able to penetrate an armored target from dozens/hundreds of yards/meters away.
Isn't this a Star Trek episode?
the addition of an unjust action to an unjust action does not result in a just action. basic addition and subtraction can tell you this.
Well what if you multiply the unjust actions instead of adding them?
Mac users ARE the type who read popsci.
And if you don't realize that if you fail to maintain the ability to protect yourself (and that almost always involves raising eyebrows in the international arena) that someone is going to come along and try to stomp you into the ground to take your toilet, then your brain is fucked up beyond repair.
I've worked on/in the CAVE and many other " virtual reality" projects for a while, and it is just a tool, like any other.
...
...), it made me think for a while.
It could be used for "evil" or for "good".
Many of the applications that the military, government and other entities want this for have to do with virtual prototyping, simulations, ergonomics testing, design interference testing,
There's some really cool and interesting things, but a real holodeck is, of course, incredibly difficult (if not impossible).
The problems dealing with haptics and the other senses are phenomenal.
Fantastically difficult things to do:
-generalized haptics / forced feedback
-generalized olfactory, motion, temp, aural, visual sense generation
-realtime "rendering" of realistic world to suit all of the senses.
-realtime physics simulation
There is useful stuff there though.
Still, after seeing the Matrix for the first time a while ago and after seeing some of the things going on with direct brain implants (the recent thing about the blind person, the cat,
I think that there is a lot of scary research going on, without much thought or planning and certainly little consideration of the ramifications, ethical and otherwise.
I like the "real" world, whatever that is.
-Ralph
You whiney foreign bitches really irritate me.
"You big, mean, stupid US. You could kick our ass, so we don't like you. We're too poor and stupid to protect ourselves so we'll just insult you every chance we get, and maybe you'll decide that one day you should let us sit on top for a while."
Not a chance; save your breath, fuckwad. You obviously have less than a clue.
CAVE - Cave Automatic Virtual Environment. Reminds me of PINE - PINE is not elm! and GNU - Gnu's Not Unix!
:-)
yes, yes, not really on topic, but I thought it was funny.
Well spotted; did you miss the original "note the recursive algorithm" bit, perchance?
I find this neat on so many levels, though; it's almost as if someone had managed to sneak a few more geeks than regulations allow into the Army...
The name "CAVE" is reminiscent of one of the first ever virtual environments - Crowther and Woods' Colossal Cave Adventure - "you see a maze of twisty passages, all alike".
As some RPG-geeks (especially D&D players) may know, 10'x10'x10' is an archetypical basic room/corridor size for Ye Olde Dungeon Bash, and the home to anything from a bunch of orcs to a (very cramped) dragon on a Pile-of-Treasure(TM)...
As a side-note, my present favourite recursive acronym refers to a common web-based publication feature: MUCH Under Construction Here.
-- M.C.
I don't think it has been reinforced enough that the CAVE is a VERY VERY old technology. It was developed in like 1993 at the Beckman Institute at NCSA/UIUC. The first ones were here at NCSA and at UIC in Chicago. They're EVERYWHERE now. The CAVE has been used to do tons of research and even produce an IMAX movie.
Oh BTW CAVE QUAKE already exists. Someone here at UIUC wrote it about 2 years ago, and when Mike Abrash was here last he played it. I think you can even play it networked with multiple caves. Control is however VERY VERY awkward.
While likening it to the holodeck may be a nifty way for PopSci to sell magazines (haven't seen the article myself) I can guarentee it has nothing at all to do with Holography. That would be a cool future technology (distant future) but we can't even do realistic color holograms yet.
Then again, like I said I haven't read the article. Maybe it is all a really tacky red and has a ton of HeNe lasers all over the place in it :)
I never knew what WINE stood for... thank you! I assumed it was something like "Windows is not enough," or something like that...
Windows is not enough, starring Linus Torvalds as James Bond, 007...
Actually, everyone who has posted here so far has been wrong. Although PINE now stands for Pine Internet News and Email, it started out as Pine Is Nearly Elm and went through a few intermediate stages. It's never been Pine Is Not Elm.
But don't take my word for it--an author of the program knows far better than I. -------- I really should get an account. I mean, I take the time to write something, only to have it moderated down to -12 for posting as an AC.
.
rodent...
rodent...
Tactical nuclear weapons are a viable alternative!
The CAVE's have been around for a long time at research institutions (I first used one at the Uni of Houston in the summer of 96), and Quake 2 *has* been ported to the system... as to whether you can really get an enjoyable play experience out of it... well
http://hoback.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~prajl ich/caveQuake/
:wq
Now the army can also play Robin Hood again, the Lieutenant being Robin, the Sergeant Major being Little John, and the cook Friar Tuck :-)
:^)
Or some sergeant who always felt suppressed by his superiors will create his fantasy where they will serve them
For an acronym to be recursive it has to refer back to itself -- not just have itself as its first word. More specifically it will need a verb.
'Pine IS not elm' requires one to see the acronym to understand all the words.
CAVE just has the acronym as its first word, but it doesn't refer to itself, so it's not recurives.
I'm a dork.
There's a big list of recursive acronyms in the standard emacs distribution etc directory. My favorite two were always:
FINE Is Not Emacs
THIEF Isn't Even FINE
Do you really believe your claim about health care in the US ?!?
Real life: a family was turned away from an emergency room, given a bottle of liquid aspirin for their child's fever, and DIRECTIONS to another hospital as they didn't have insurance. Their child died on the 40+ mile trip. It happens with alarming frequency.
Your statement about NATO is correct though.
The NCSA at UIUC here in Urbana-Champaign has had one of these for a while. I'm not sure how similar it is, but you can find out more here.
You said: Windows is not enough, starring Linus Torvalds as James Bond, 007...
Methinks instead of the simple "007" it should be something like
"Name is Torvalds, Linus Torvalds, 0.0.7"
Heheheh
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Last Year my Advanced Computer Graphics project was on the ImmersaDesk, here at University of Alaska it's sort of a half-a-CAVE. The ImmersaDesk uses the same set of CAVE-libs that the cave does, it's just 1/6th the price.
// Zarf //
The biggest problem I had developing on the CAVE was the UI. It uses a wand and head tracker to get your position in space. But I found that my gestures were very limited and that using 'head woggle' for judging a user's perspective in 3d was a bit clumsy.
I also found that after more than 3 hours in the CAVE I'd have massive headaches due to the LCD shuttering action and low light.
Yes, the CAVE has a way to go.
-
[signature]
I'm a student at the University of Michigan, and I write code for our CAVE here in the Virtual Reality Lab... CAVE's have been around for many years, especially in educational institutions (UIC and UIUC have had CAVEs for at least 5 years). Yes, you can play Quake in it. Yes, it's damned immersive. Unfortunately, the display takes an SGI Onyx2 with at *least* 2 InfiniteReality pipes to drive it -- US$500,000 worth of hardware on top of the already expensive price of actually getting a CAVE built and aligned by a company like Pyramid Systems.
/Andrew
>Of course we have the crusades, the various civil wars, holy causes, and of course the Inquisition. All fought with low tech. All fought more or less hand to hand. And many weapons were designed to kill someone only at very close range--such as a double-handed long sword, whose primary purpose was to dismember a knight in shiny armor in much the same way you pull apart a cooked lobster.
Hate to nitpick you to death, but the primary use of the broadsword was to bludgeon the peasents...a 'knight in shining armor' was practically invincible...until he fell of his horse, and was beaten to death by the feet/hooves/whatever as the battle raged about (and right over) him. And 'bludgeon' is fairly accurate...even if the sword was sharp when the knight rode into battle, it didn't stay that way for very long.
I've been playing in the CAVE enviroment here at the University of Michigan for about three years...a bunch of my friends program VR stuff for it. It's nothing new, and the technology implemented in it is decidedly old skool. It is a very 'open' setup, as Quake and several other things have been ported to it. In fact, even a Palm Pilot can be used to control it. The setup consists of four projectors, putting images on three walls and the floor. Users wear LCD shutter glasses, and the main user holds a wand that has a couple of buttons on it. The main user also has a head tracker on he/she/it's shutter glasses. It is a decidedly cool setup, but could use many improvements.
-Ryan
The story of my life: "What the hell am I doing here?"
I don't know what processor controlled the first "programmable missle controller chip", but it probably wasn't the 4004. The 4004 was developed for a Japanese company called Busicom. It was the first microprocessor from Intel, and was designed to control a desktop calculator. I don't know if it was ever used for military purposes, but that is not what it was designed for.
Seriously, one of the major Holodeck features is the recreation of physical objects, such as a chair to sit on. While a couple of people working in the same space can be useful, how applicable is this sort of VR training to the real thing? I would think that you don't get a huge amount of useful training out of something that doesn't even have a real cockpit...
Along those lines, the NCSA at the Univ. of Illinois (Urbana) has had one for some time (note the Dec. 1997 "last updated"). I have actually had the opportunity to go into the CAVE. You wear special glasses and the experience is awesome. I would suggest that if you can get a tour in one, do so!
BTW, the link above has some user manuals as well as some descriptions about how the whole thing works.
March 3-4, 2000, actually. The EOH page is here.
They had a CAVE at Supercomputing '93 in Portland, OR (1993!). I went and checked it out, and it was pretty cool for 1993. But unless the tech has really improved, it would be pretty damn boring next to a stereoscopically rendered quake3.
That's why i'm calling my current project BINARA - Binara Is Not A Recursive Acronym.
Another damned comic
+++ NO CARRIER
Interestingly, the EVL also made the 3D wire-frame projection of the Death Star trench that was used in the rebel briefing scene in Star Wars. This is a project with deep roots and has been around for quite a while ...
War is damned expensive, losing a battle because the soldiers are not properly equipped and trained is more expensive. Many modern weapons are too expensive to expend in peacetime training.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I can assure you that the average soldier understands that war is not a video game, that real people, including soldiers, get killed and wounded. That's more than I can say for some civilians.
Realistic training is vital for combat effectiveness and survival. If you have to think about it, you will be in big trouble when dealing with the high stress of combat. The advantages of virtual reality simulations are cost and safety. Field exercises with live ammunition are very expensive and safety requirements are at odds with realism.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
...will be the last thing mankind ever invents.
Hoo hoo! Glad someone else here has heard of it. Saw the story...thought "There's been one at the NCSA since before I was here." Truly aweomse experience, but with one caveat:
Take Dramamine before you use it.
Hey...did you notice the barf bag on the door at the one at Beckman?
Yeah, let's fight a war where one side never has to see any blood, and all the bleeding's done by the other side. Go, U.S. Army! You guys must be real proud of your achievements.
Yeah, I couldn't wait to enlist in Akaji Monkey's Politically Correct Army (PCA), where we purposely let the enemy kill some of our own troops in the interest of "fairness." If you loved Affirmative Action, well brother, you ain't seen nothin' yet! The next time that a war arises, we're gonna airdrop some of our finest tanks and air fighters, and to really level the playing field (no pun intended!), a random few of those fighters will be equipped with nuclear weapons! If getting ourselves nuked will prevent the enemy from losing their self-esteem and feeling bad about themselves, let me be the first to paint a target on my chest!
Yeesh.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
See, out here in the real world, sometimes people have to be killed -- yes, even people with families back at home. Of course, I guess you think that Adolf Hitler would've stopped invading all those countries if we sent him a nice letter asking him to behave.
Flower power, duuuuude!
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
We don't have many enemies, either!
Canada has practically zero clout in the world, though. I'll take having a large influence in the world, picking up some jealous enemies along the way, over being a non-player any day of the week.
It's like the New York Yankees versus the Montreal Expos. Who hates the Expos? Nobody! Why? Because they have no impact on the game. Who hates the Yankees? Just about everyone but Yankees fans, because success breeds contempt.
Of course, a similar effect is in play in terms of friendly countries. Because of their power, an awful lot of countries want the US to be on their side. Other than the US, who would say the same about Canada? Who would care?
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
My school has one of these....tried it last fall...
.
Check it out here
Very cool, seems to be the same thing the army is, quote 'developing'....and I know that this has been around for quite some time.
They actually ported Quake and Quake2 to these things, it's actually quite fun...unfortunately financial restraints keep us from doing too much deathmatching....something on the order of $10million a piece.......
But it does definitely feel -almost- real. It's pretty cool to have things come up at you in life size from all sides....hopefully the technology will get a good push and go down in price, I want one in my room
Julius X
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
Disney has had multi-user caves in a commercial product for the Hercules ride at DisneyQuest for over a year. These multiple users were in the same cave. Offshoots of the Responsive Workbench project (by one or more of the Gang of Five schools if I recall correctly) have focused on remote collaboration in the RWB's semi-immsersive virtual reality environment. While there may be some interesting uses arising from synchronization of multiple caves, the concept is certainly not novel. The accomplishment in this project seems to be the acquisition of the necessary funding to put well-known research work in a "real-world" setting.
Yes/No. How much do you trust your government? This innovation is interesting in that it requires a huge social system to implement it, but it distances incredibly the folk who use it from that same social system.
Constructing a few situations that appear to me to be analogous: Individual multi-cellular animals "solved" this problem by requiring everybody to have the same genetic code (i.e., to be identical, but we still get cancer) and in mammals it is paritally implemented by the blood-brain barrier. In a hive of ants, everybody is each-other's sister (except for the disposeable drones). Blind mole-rats have one queen who rules the nest, but I don't remember the rules of inheritance...(are the sub-queens allowed to breed?)
How do you think people should solve it?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The soldier morals don't do much more than lower his/her chances of survival. Once in battle if they don't kill the target chances are good the target is going to kill them.
The problem is the people who declare war never have to see the blood. It's body counts and statistics. This is a problem that has been around every sence midevil kings opted not to lead the armys in battle.
IMHO anything that can bring leaders in contact with the blood (even camas on bombs) is a good thing. If you bomb a person you get to see the expression on his face before he is "deleated" an expression that will last forever.
The problem with iconning targets is a problem on many levels...
In battle the soldiers morals are not suppresed. He will be compleatly aware those Icons aren't just pixles. It dosn't become "just a video game" to him just becouse he is killing icons. He knows there are real people behind those icons. The more he sees those icons and not the real people the more the icons start to look like friends and famaly. It's a matter of psycology. He will eventually vertuallise an enemy he can not kill simply becouse after every "frag" he says "I wonder" the frags become kills.. the enemy becomes someone he might have known.. A sensory disconect forces us to ask such questions of morality.
It's easyer to see a person as evil when you can see the person and get force feed stereotypes.
There is annother problem... Is icons are the way to identify targets... that just turns our soldiers into atomitons. Machines can allready target and kill faster than humans and can survive a pounding. The intelect is what makes humans better killing machines than robots. The ability to correctly identify our targets. A machine iconifying targets for a human soldier would be a problem. Crack it or worse... utilise a defect. Then a whole army base can vanish from the vertual landsape. "Were did the icons go?"
Finnaly if the computer mistakenly idenifyed an innocent as a target.. say the people your asigned to protect... It would be a MAJOR political event. Even if it only happend on occasion.. It happends.. it's repeatable.. and can be demonstrated infront of the press.
Also when trainning when fragging icons the soldier will have no reason to become comfortable with killing real people who are simply represented by icons. The moment he is in a real battle he won't be seeing the icons as video game carricters but as real people.. and he will not be able to shoot.
I don't actually exist.
CAVE - Cave Automatic Virtual Environment. Reminds me of PINE - PINE is not elm! and GNU - Gnu's Not Unix!
yes, yes, not really on topic, but I thought it was funny.
___________________
rooooar
I never knew what WINE stood for... thank you! I assumed it was something like "Windows is not enough," or something like that...
___________________
rooooar
There are several in existence already, and they've been there for 5+ years.
NCSA.uiuc has one..
uic's has had a cave for years:
http://www.evl.uic.edu/pape/CAVE/
it sounds alot cooler than it is. its running off some old sgi box or other...
we play cave quake on it. http://hoback.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~prajl ich/caveQuake/ but its not very stable, and the interface needs some work. one cool thing is that your gun is your cursur and its rendered in full 3d instead of just a 2d image. you can twist your gun around and stuff. you have to actualy duck, to duck in the game, and jumping is automated so you end up getting stuck in the walls alot.
In all seriousness, the CAVE is being researched and developed here at Brown University's Graphics Group, headed by Andy van Dam. I was asked if I wanted to do my thesis using one, but I rejected the idea because I'd have to teach myself this complex structure and write for it. I'm thinking I shoulda just sucked it up, huh?
-bp
I had the privilege of working at SARA while building an ISP for the Dutch phone company back in '95 (great bunch of folks there, hi harold!)and got to play in the CAVE for a little while. It was a most enjoyable experience. They use the first SGI Onyx2 Reality Monster ever made! It was amazing stuff, back in '95. Of course, why this is news now, I have no idea. The coolest part of SARA though is the old Cray thats been converted to a couch in the lobby, since its too expensive to operate.
\w0zz - OpenBSD - A Better Solution
You said 'Hitler'! Godwin's Law! Thread's Over!
The CAVE is sold by a company VRCO. Anyone with a spare $15k laying around can buy one. It even runs on linux.
Its based heavily on OpenGL.
An open source analog is in the works right now.
The Secret Service wouldn't appreciate having to deal with Mounties. Next thing you'd know, President Clinton would find himself on trial. Oh, wait, we tried that ourselves, and it doesn't work.
When I was at the University of Illinois I took people on a tour of the CAVE at the NCSA. It's pretty cool. Four 7 foot projecttion screens on each side of you. You stand in the middle holding a joystick that is tracked by a sensor on the ceiling. LCD goggles that flip opaceity between your eyes gives you a 3D enviroment.
They the cab to a Catapiller bulldozer that they were looking into using as some sort of computer aided training.
It's alot like a first person shooter, only with out guns or textures. Personally I don't think VR will ever become something revolutionary until we develop a more immersive enviorment (real touch (not just that lame vibration stuff) and the solving the dismounted soldier problem for example).
Then again, I could see this replacing current pr0n material.
Hmmm... ok, now I see the advantages. How much longer until I can buy one of these? :)
--== [N] ==--
Izaak
The Bolachek Journals
At least for the US Marines, When we yell kill and stick our bayonete into a prictice target, that target is shaped like a human. Russian infantry to be exact. Most of the targets we shoot our rifles at our human shaped. The Marine Corps has not forgot that we make our living at the bloody end of the spear.
Semper Fi
Of course no-one would attack Canada. That would piss off the Mounties. Then all heck would break loose.
In the immortal words of Socrates, who said; 'I drank what?'
Sure thing. Makes the job of removing deeply ingrained (socialized and inborn) morals that much easier, since you have to remove less in order to create an efficient killer.
Now this is just crap. Do you honestly believe that the military is staffed with golems which only strive to perform whatever task is set forth by commanders?
Think about that for a second. What you are basically positing here is that whenever you join the military you give up whatever identity you have.
What it all boils down to is that the military is a job. Nothing more, nothing less. Having been in the Marines for 11 years I can honestly say that I never met any Marine who's sole goal was to kill defenseless women and children. I can also say that nearly all of the Marines I have ever known were moral and honorable people.
I suppose that if you have no faith in Humanity it would be easy to think that a video game can make anyone into an amoral killing machine.
Fortunately all of the people I know far exceed your expectations.
In the immortal words of Socrates, who said; 'I drank what?'
There's been another CAVE in the computer sci. dept at Indiana University--Bloomington for several years now. Here's their homepage: http://avl.iu.edu/index.html You can even take tours. woohoo!
1. Too dark
2. Not multiuser
3. Too small of a room
Projector technology right now sucks for the high end. The CAVE uses CRT projectors (much like the ones in the old big screen TV's) instead of a brighter technology such as LCD, DLP, or Digital Light Valve. Unfortunately, the manufacturers of these brighter products have not pushed the refresh rate limit. In order to use the StereoGraphics shutter glasses, you need at least 100 Hz refresh rate out of your projectors. Currently, the only types of projectors that can handle 100 Hz are CRT's.
These CAVE's are not really multiuser. There are some real problems with perspective in these environments. Only one person can have a corrected view frustrum, and everyone else has to put up with a warping and shearing scene. Of course, this is assuming you are trying to visualize something floating in front of you. This is very hard to describe, but if you think about it, imagine projecting an object floating in front of you, while trying to give your user the ability to walk all around it. Anyhow, this is impossible in any multiuser mode.
CAVE are small. 10'^3 may seem like a lot of space, (as most people's dorm rooms are 12'^3), but oftimes people are limited in movement. This also limits the number of people who can share this experience.
The Electronic Visualization Lab at University of Illinois, Argonne National Labs Futures Lab, and NCSA all have major research going on in CAVE technology.
Another simpler version of the CAVE is what they call workbench technologies. See:Caltech
Stanford
Fakespace
-Stryemer
We are the music makers,
and we are the dreamers of the dream.
-Stryemer
We are the music makers,
and we are the dreamers of the dream.
Sub-frankenstein nonsense, of course, the machine falls in love with him and tries to pull him permanently into virtual reality. But now I'm thinking - hey maybe it was real after all...
Or not, as the case may be. ;o)
-Baz
The Cave is the big room style VR thing, linking two together may be new, but I doubt it. Whats cool is that the military are using that kind of thing for simulation :)
You can't win a fight.
That, and a miriad of other practical entertainment applications, of course.
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Well, I doubt it will go to blinking squares. The fact is, that at least for America, we care what we target. We don't want to target schools and churches, we want command centers, factories, and other targets that actually affect the opposing force's capability to make war. If for no other reason than we don't want to waste a 2.5 million dollar smart missile on a church, when we could get something usefule. So I doubt that the video will be replaced any time soon.
Also, I don't think that getting "up close and personal" about killing is really much of a deterent. One can read any number of accounts of really really sick shit being perpetrated by soldiers armed with nothing but swords. Look at the Crusades, or the accounts in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, for examples.
Making soldiers see their victims eye to eye will do nothing to end wars.
Yeah, let's fight a war where one side never has to see any blood, and all the bleeding's done by the other side. Go, U.S. Army! You guys must be real proud of your achievements.
Armies have been proud of slaughter for all of human history. They've enjoyed seeing blood. If we don't see the blood, we will not be any less civilized. Your sarcasm is misdirected.
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The Oil companies have been using CAVEs to visualize the innards of oil and gas reservoirs. Its pretty useful. The problem geologists have is that they are having to visualize the insides of extremely complex 3D objects. (I'd say that the Earth is a pretty complex 3D object, wouldn't you?) I've been in one at ARCO (a 3 wall and a floor model) and seen some really cool structures represented that would have been impossible to really draw in 2D. This thing is a much bigger boon to science than to the military.
Das ist sehr groovy.
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The CAVE works well for visualizing N-body calculations, like galaxy mergers, because the particles can be represented by simple shapes like spheres, and because you can pare down the particles to a reasonable number without losing too much information. Unfortunately, we had less success visualizing computational fluid dynamics calculations because the number of polygons required to represent the complicated surfaces made the whole business prohibitively sluggish. That was too bad because I had had these visions of the protostellar disk models swirling in midair in front of me like the accretion disks in ``The Black Hole'' (a cheesy sci-fi movie, for those not familiar with it). Oh, well, someday.
-r
(1) When all you can pick on is spelling, it means you have nothing meaningful to say.
(2) I specifically picked the Khmer Rouge because I am aware the US has done nothing to stop them. I was engaging in something called "irony", a subtle practice which apparently some people just don't get.
if you beleive that killing people can ever be 'appropriate', then you have been brainwashed. the most basic tenet of any real moral philosophy is the sanctity of human life.
When a burglar breaks into your house and puts a gun to your throat, do you believe it is immoral to defend yourself, even if you have to resort to lethal force? Or do you believe you should simply yield, and perhaps die?
The analogy does extend to the international arena. I'm sorry if you don't see that, but unfortunately it does.
. it makes the US look foolish on the world stage when they say to milosevic et al. "don't kill people, killing people is a bad bad thing! hell, we think it's such a bad thing, we are going to send OUR army in and kill YOUR people. basically, they are saying "we will teach you not to kill by killing."... tha's like 'fucking for virginity'... it just makes no sense.
*shrug* I'm sorry if it doesn't make any sense to you, but it's about the use and/or the threat of use of lethal force. Sometimes you can stop someone by talking them down. Sometimes you can stop someone by threatening to blow them away. And sometimes you can't stop them--and wind up having to blow them away before they kill more people themselves.
We tried talking in Kosovo. We tried for *years*. Did no good; in fact, it got to the point where the folks there believed they could do whatever the hell they felt like because President Clinton didn't have the balls to intervene. Are you suggesting that in light of massacres and rape and pillaging and death we should send over yet another polite letter asking if they could stop?
Of course we could always just ignore things in Kosovo--quite a few people here in the United States advocated just that. But if you recall your world history, you'd remember that World War I started because of interlocking relationships between various factions that were (and are now still) fighting over there.
And if you think an isolated massacre sucks, try a world war in a world full of smaller powers with weapons of mass destruction.
how is training your army to be more effective at killing going to reduce the number of casualties, you nitwit! it might reduce the financial cost of war for you, but tha's about it.
Simple: the threat of force causes most people to think twice about starting a war themselves. In fact, it's working with you, so don't think it doesn't work with world leaders as well.
Again, if you recalled your history, you'd note the reason why the United States dropped two nuclear warheads on Japan at the end of World War II was because Japan refused to surrender and refused to stop making war on it's neighbors, and the estimated casualty count for invading Japan was in the multiple million range.
What happend in Nagasaki and Heroshima sucked. What could have happend if we had choosen to invade Japan would have been far worse.
why only two? you mean only two that you can think of... there's things like diplomacy, sanctions, the UN war crimes tribunal, etc. now, i don't have a problem if some highly highly skilled commandos capture these murderers so that they can stand trial in a court of law (what a new-age thought!) but, again, fighting to end some fighting makes you look like an idiot.
Several points.
1) Diplomacy only works when the agressors are willing to sit down and discuss reasonable measures. In the case of Kosovo, diplomacy was tried for *years*, and because the people involved had the honor of small hungry children who promise not to steal cookies from the cookie jar, diplomacy was a total and complete failure.
2) Sanctions only work when the country who is having sanctions used against it cares one whit, and when the parties imposing a sanction actually follow it. Or didn't you read about the Russian oil tankers who were attempting to run the UN imposed blockade against Iraqi oil?
By and large, with a willing leader who doesn't care about his people, sanctions don't work at all. Or did you forget about Cuba, who is moving into a quarter century of sanctions without changing it's government one millimeter?
3) A UN war tribunal only works when the governments who form the tribunal under UN authority are willing to send troups in in order to settle the situation--that is, if the UN is willing to send in troups who are prepared to kill people. Without such forces who are willing to impose the will of the tribunal, such a court of law is little more than a legal masturbation exercise--it may feel good, but ultimately produces nothing but a small mess.
4) As to the commandos: the United States has tried that on rare occassion, and has gotten into quite a bit of trouble. Frankly, sending in commandos is a violation of international law, while sending in troups is not, and for good reason: in theory, nations are not supposed to resort to undermining other nations--their complaints are supposed to be brought out in the open so the international community can know what the hell is going on.
Furthermore, the United States has made sending in commandos as you suggest illegal unless the President signs a special order. So it's not something we can "routinely" do.
well, this is just wrong again. it is not your army that protects you from domestic deathsquads (i didn't know that was a problem in the states, i guess i'll have to look for them next time i'm down there), it would be your local police dept, as far as i can tell.
There are clear lines of jurisdiction. And in the United States, it is the army who is responsible for external invaders, and the states (and by extension the local police) who are responsible for keeping local law and order.
Of course there is a lot of 'bleed over' in sharing technology: the city where I live are using technology developed for the Army to catch speeders at night. And the same training techniques are used, more or less, by the local police force to train cadets.
But what I was talking about was the fact that unlike many areas of the world, having a powerful army who is directly controlled by a civilian government, and who is embedded in a culture who prizes diversity and law and order above chaos and "kill your neighbor if he's not your brother" allows me to sleep better at night.
I believe that this is sometimes the case--I have translated acounts of some of the very same roman sooldiers and gladiators you speak of who rather enjoyed killing (or claimed to.)
Well, the predominate religion of the soldiers at that time, Mithriasm (sp?), put a high value on acting like a soldier: that is, it put a high value on killing and being killed with honor. So in a sense, killing folks and dying on your own shield were both considered holy, religious acts.
When Christianity started sweeping the Roman empire with it's acceptance by Constantine, Christianity adopted many of these "millitaristic" aspects. Thus things like "onward Christian Soldiers, marching as to war" has a long, ingraned history in Christian thought. Of course Christianity borrowed heavily from earlier Roman military cults, including things like an afterlife and a "heavenly reward for a life lifed well"--well being redefined to include non-soldierly acts.
In fact, as far as I can find, in Western civilization the notion that killing someone during battle is a bad thing is a recent invention. In large part because of people's disgust at the very cold blooded and calculated way we can now kill thousands or millions with the push of a button.
So I would argue that in fact, the depersonalization of war has made war unthinkable, rather than the other way around. That is, war and killing people was more acceptable to people when we were doing it hand to hand and face to face.
I see someone's not up on their history.
Let's see. We have the Mongolians who, in the process of spreading their might, wiped out millions, one at a time, using nothing more sophisticated than an axe. They were deadly enough that the name Khan just rang all sorts of bells with that Star Trek movie...
Then we have the Romans, whose spread of civilization was done at the cost of all of those insignificant, worthless "gauls" who weren't considered important enough by the Romans to do much more with than slaughter and enslave.
Of course we have the crusades, the various civil wars, holy causes, and of course the Inquisition. All fought with low tech. All fought more or less hand to hand. And many weapons were designed to kill someone only at very close range--such as a double-handed long sword, whose primary purpose was to dismember a knight in shiny armor in much the same way you pull apart a cooked lobster.
People have been killing people in very large numbers at very close range for thousands of years. It wasn't like the invention of a programmable missle controller chip (the predecessor to the Intel 4004) caused people to suddenly realize "hey, I don't have to take moral responsibility for who I kill, so let's fight even bloodier and bigger wars than ever before."
Nah; technology found its way to the private sector where it was used, ah, um, for stuff like this web site.
Political science theory going over your head? Here's a brief primer.
In the United States, we've studied these sorts of things to death. Things like the appropriateness and inappropriateness of war. And what most of the better thinkers in the US have come up with is that you only fight a war when another country (a) starts it, (b) that this war will affect citizens abroad in a negative way, (c) you can go in and stop it, and (d) the cost of stopping the war (by engaging the other side) is less than the cost of allowing the beligerant party to continue.
So in the United States, as we are the defacto policeman of the world (and have been to one degree or another since the Monroe Doctrine), we've been trying to figure out how to reduce the cost of war (in terms of casulties on both our side and theirs) in an attempt to promote a degree of "piece" at least for US citizens traveling abroad.
It sucks.
But until you can figure out a pieceful way to solve things like the Balkanization of Yugoslavia (yes, I appreciate the irony) and the murder and/or displacement of millions of innocent civilians in places like Chechnia, Kosovo, or Cambodia in a way which doesn't require some form of force, unfortunately you are going to have two choices.
1) Use force. And that means having very well armed people who are very well trained at killing people, or
2) Allow madmen like the Khamer Rouge run wild, murdering whoever they like.
The world sucks. But having the biggest and baddest army in the world maximizes the chance that when I go to sleep tonight, death squads won't break into my house and murder my wife as she sleeps next to me.
though hopefully in real life they won't run "f***ing Windows 98" or invade Canada.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Next time there's a war, You'll be the first person I suggest the they rape or murder because they don't like your ethnic/race/whatever background. Maybe the next time if they do some gas chambers we can have you be first in line, since well, well.... The USA decided we weren't going to help anyone out due to those types of things, such a pitty isn't it? I mean, hey who cares if someone else in some foregin country is being raped or murdered cuz of ethernic/race/whatever backround, eh? That's the maximum American life saver. Every time there's a problem like that in some forgin country, we just don't send any troops, let those people deal with their own problems. Right? Isn't that right? Isn't that what you're saying? I mean hey, if the US doesn't send any troops who will?
Hmm, can you say lawsuit? I'm sure that'd surely be a win in court. "Child dies because hospital refused to treat child." There is no reason why a hospital should refuse any type of medical treatment to anyone because they don't have insurance. Lets see here, if ANYONE refused medical care to anyone for whatever reason, I'd say that's a good lawsuit, especially if someone dies from it. Just because your child has a fever doesn't mean you can't pay for the medical bill without insurance. It could only cost $10,000 to treat the kid and then if you have no insurance you eat it. Just plain and simple, but refusing medical treatment to anyone for whatever reason is a bad thing. I mean, what if someone died from a hospital refusing to treat them and it turns out the bill cold have cost only $10,000.00 *AND* the person could have afforded the bill. Oh man, I'm sure that'd be a multi-million dollar lawsuit.
While, your philosophical/moral standpoint is great and I *REALLY* wish it worked that way in real life, but it doesn't. The problem with taking the attitude of, "oh, lets try and work this out, and not fight" doesn't really work in the real world. In the real world you have people like Hitler, who didn't care less about countries such as France when he just basically rolled over them with the Panza divisions. If Britain weren't able to hold out as long as they did, Europe would have fell to Germany in no time. Actually if France would have started building up their military when Germany was, they probably would have been able to hold out longer and do a better job.
The point I'm trying to make is, when you have a good army, and able to possibly stomp out the other guy, and willing to take the risk of going to war to protect your country and your freedoms from nasty people, then the philosophical/moral thing is useless. What good does it do you to have philosophical ideals when you got some dictator telling you which hand to wipe your ass with?
This is also why it's good to have things such as the CAVE so that we have better trained soldiers able to kill better and quicker. I tell you this, I quite happily enjoy the little freedoms I have left, and I'd like to keep them, thank you very much!
"Nitpick: "Khan" is not a name, it's a title. " Really? If I ever get a chance to choose my own job title, Khan is going to be in it somehere! "The network has crashed! No one can do anything!" "KKHHHhhaaaaannnnnnnn!" Later Erik Z
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
"Nitpick: "Khan" is not a name, it's a title. "
Really?
If I ever get a chance to choose my own job title, Khan is going to be in it somehere!
"The network has crashed! No one can do anything!"
"KKHHHhhaaaaannnnnnnn!"
Later
Erik Z
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Why wouldn't we protect our 51st state? Canada is a valuable resource of ours...
--
Don't lead me into temptation... I can find it myself.
Ahh, the Cave is probably a lot more fun when it's aligned too. Very cool concept, but it has some implementation details to work out yet. Cords in the way, narrow goggle vision, wobbling mirrors, complicated alignment procedure, uneven brightness, screen viewing angle...
Andrew and I talked about all this the evening I was there. Most of it seems easily solvable.
What disturbs me very greatly is that Slashdot is treating this like a new thing, and nobody's apologized yet for being so blatantly wrong. I'm kicking myself for not reloading Slashdot one more time before going to sleep, so I could've seen this thing when it was freshly posted, gotten first post, and said "it's been done!" before the knuckleheads went off on those boring war tangents..
Yes, it most definitely is a problem. You don't notice it _much_ while you're there, but it's distracting and it takes away from the total immersion. Just like the wobbly mirror at umich's cave, or the effects of misaligned projectors, it's a little distraction that you're subconsciously aware of.
Not to mention the lag. You'd think that the big ol' Iris box could keep pace with the inputs, but there's a definite, and annoying, time delay before moving and seeing the results. This is particularly vicious in motion parallax situations, where your body is expecting things to move when you move, and they don't.
Don't get me wrong, Cave quake is very cool. But it has a long way to go until it's as "polished" as the 2d version of Quake.
These first generation VR decks are simply image projection on flat surfaces. No 3D objects being created or used in the scene.
I think Nanobots would be the perfect solution for creating 3D interactive environments.
Create nanobots about a millimeter in diameter. Make their external surfaces LCD panels, and give them the ability to crawl amongst each other. Nothing fancy, just sort of the nano version of cheerleaders forming a pyramid. That would be enough sophistication to build tables, chairs, and basic objects in a holodeck. As the tech advances, the nanobots get smaller, the objects they create more detailed and lifelike, and before you know it, Sherlock Holmes and Minuet are making their debuts on holodecks around the world.
P.S. - The book _Star Trek: Strange New Worlds I_ has a great short story that explains how Minuet came into existence...
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
the appropriateness and inappropriateness of war if you beleive that killing people can ever be 'appropriate', then you have been brainwashed. the most basic tenet of any real moral philosophy is the sanctity of human life. it makes the US look foolish on the world stage when they say to milosevic et al. "don't kill people, killing people is a bad bad thing! hell, we think it's such a bad thing, we are going to send OUR army in and kill YOUR people. basically, they are saying "we will teach you not to kill by killing."... tha's like 'fucking for virginity'... it just makes no sense.
we are the defacto policeman of the world heh, tha's a good one. so basically, the US is hypocritical once again: by this logic, you have completely destroyed the notion of the soveriegn nation-state. so when the US complains about unfair trade practices or illegal immigrants, they are coming from the standpoint of: we can go anywhere in the world and do anything to anyone we want, but if anybody tries to do that to us, well, we'll just have to kill/sanction/brainwash them.
reduce the cost of war (in terms of casulties on both our side and theirs) how is training your army to be more effective at killing going to reduce the number of casualties, you nitwit! it might reduce the financial cost of war for you, but tha's about it.
you are going to have two choices why only two? you mean only two that you can think of... there's things like diplomacy, sanctions, the UN war crimes tribunal, etc. now, i don't have a problem if some highly highly skilled commandos capture these murderers so that they can stand trial in a court of law (what a new-age thought!) but, again, fighting to end some fighting makes you look like an idiot.
But having the biggest and baddest army in the world maximizes the chance that when I go to sleep tonight, death squads won't break into my house and murder my wife as she sleeps next to me. well, this is just wrong again. it is not your army that protects you from domestic deathsquads (i didn't know that was a problem in the states, i guess i'll have to look for them next time i'm down there), it would be your local police dept, as far as i can tell. of course, if you were a little more widely read even of your own citizens' writing, you would know that many of the worst deathsquads in history were armed and trained by the US military. grab some chomsky and re-assess your ideas of the nation-state.
I think you misunderstand some basic tenants of human thought. You can not tell Milosovic, 'Excuse me, we rather disapprove of you slaughtering thousands of people over there, could you please stop?' and expect him to stop. So unless you plan on selectively eliminating every human that has a potential for violence from the gene pool (which must necessarily involve violence and is usually classified as Genocide since it would end the human race) we will have violent people that must be opposed. And as nice as it is to believe that laying down in the street in front of a few dozen tanks is going to make a HUGE difference, if the driver of the tank just runs you down you're screwed.
As for Capturing people like milosovic, how exactly do you expect to do that without violence? The man doesn't just stroll down the street by himself.
I suggest you give up your hopelessly naive world view and whiny apologistic philosophy and go take a look at what REALLY happens when a violent person is given free reign to do what they will.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Whether or not he can spell has no bearing on his point.
Quit being a whiner and grow up.
Hmmm... a few questions:
... those are the few trek refs i can rember after looking at code for 12 hours ...
1. Can it dynamicly create random enviroments based upon Sherlock Homels.
2. Provide a 'back-up' doctor.
3. Become the nervus center for a artifical life.
Ok
/* Lobster Stick To Magnet!*/
We have one at our lab, a 8' one with moveable walls, so you can get a nice 24' X 8' screen or an L shape or whatever you like. I stared working here last year and spent a good four months setting up the hardware and software when the CAVE walls and projectors were finally installed. It was a really fun time but also frustrating in parts. We've gotten VRCO's CAVE Library, WorldToolKit's IDO (Immersive Display Option), and VisualEyes from GM working on it.
Here's a stack of links I've aquried:
CAVERNUS
- Check out applications to download. My personal favorite is Crayoland.
CAVE QUAKE II
- Quake II in the CAVE? What's cooler then that? It's quite unnerving fighting a Tank that's literally taller then you.
Teleimmersion at EVL
- Connecting CAVEs
Welcome to CAVERNsoft
- How to connect CAVEs
Center for Parallel Computers - VR-Cube
- The 6-walled CAVE in sweden. My office-mate saw this, said it was the most immersive experience he's ever done. Forgot where he was!
Ascension Techology Corporation
- These guys make the magnetic tracker we're using.
Welcome to Polhemus!
- another type of tracker
Pyramid Systems
- they'll build a CAVE for ya
AMPRO Corporation
- We use their projectors
CAVE Programming
- Some information on programming for the CAVE
CAVEdev::main
- Some other cool projects for the CAVE
enjoy!
---
I wear pants.
It seems to me a VR solution like this is really clunky and difficult to pull-off. How far away are we from being able to have a Matrix-like plug in the back of our heads?
:)
The problems at hand, I imagine, are those of figuring out how the brain works and how to interface with it in a high-speed manner, and a computer system sophisticated enought to fool our brains. (By this I mean a damn near infinite level of detail - sights, sounds, smells, everything that makes up real life. Hmmm... if said computer system is running a certian unstable OS, and it crashes... ooh, i dont even want to think about it
The first to pull this off will make an extremely large fortune, I suspect!
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
It has potential to be a good thing. The army has been using games like doom and quake for some time to help train group tactics and other armies do the same thing. If they continue thier trend of "virtualizing" war, they will soon no longer need the foot soldier. The soldier will become a machine, while the human is back at HQ controlling it, or a platoon of them.
This would be a much better situation then we currently have, despite the doom-sayers. A mechanized soldier would never shoot an innocent. No more mother's getting notices of their son's untimely demise. And war's could actually be won or lost really fast. And this extends to not just infantry, but air power too. I read an article in (i think) popular science that described new fighter/bomber jets that had a wingspan of 2 meters and flew pilotless. The plan was for them to attack in swarms with remote pilots sitting on the ground.
The sad part is that none of it has to happen, but it will anyway. If those same mech soldiers were used as man power in countries that need it, well you know the rest... But some guys like to fight..
Expect this trend to continue.
--------
WWGD? (What Would Goku Do?)
the famous khan you are referring to is probably Dzingis Khan (not sure about the english spelling, AFAIK the 'dz' should be pronounced like 'j' in jungle, both 'i' like in 'pit' and 'g' like in 'egg' (the first one or the second one:-))
erik
...all excited, don't know why...
1: the previous post talked about kosovo, not about wwII. it's the people in kosovo who were raped and murdered etc...
2: the genocide was definitely known during wwII. the racial purity was official ideology of nazis. maybe the exact numbers where not known...
erik
...all excited, don't know why...
Why doesn't somebody just build a system of rods into the floor that can raise up and down via computer control. Figure out some form of surface you could conform over given shapes and you could eaisly add terrain. This has to be feasable. That way you could make the stupid chair rise up out of the ground. That would be awesome. Better still if you are really bored make the surface somehow pocketed so you could inflate air into it and make the ground hard or soft, so your ass wouldn't hurt in the chair.
and i am not aware of the US govt ever stating that they would protect Canada any more so than they would protect any G7 country.
Haven't you ever heard of NATO? The agreement there is that if any member country is attacked then the outher countries will defend it.
And your universal healthcare is having serious problems. I heard that you guys are having problems with people being able to get into emergancy rooms. In the U.S. all people have access to emergancy rooms, there is no turning away.
Nascantur in Admiratione. (Let them be born in Wonder)
Actually under U.S. law hospitals are required to accept people in the emergancy room and they cannot require a proof of insurance. Unfortunately it gets abused so that people with very minor medical problems go to the emergancy room and tie up resources (such as supplies and a doctor's time that should go to people who really need it)
Nascantur in Admiratione. (Let them be born in Wonder)
We have one here at the University of Virginia Center for Advanced Computational Tech. at NASA Langley. It's kinda neat the first few times, but there's the nagging problem of getting things to wrap around the corners of the room properly. To replace it, we've invested in ARC's VisionDome. Ooooooo... :-)
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
If I remember correctly, there use to be an SGI OpenGL version of Doom. This alone would make it rather easy to transfer to a CAVE-like system. Since the CAVE in Amsterdam is also equipped (AFAIR) with a very fast network connection allowing it to connect to other CAVEs, multiplayer mode is entirely possible, and probably already done.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
http://www2.sara.nl/hec/vr/cave/.
I went there a couple of years ago and was suitably impressed. They use several high-end SGI to control the 3D display on several walls (please don't say we could do this with PC's nowadays. You can't). You need to put SGI's 3D glasses (crystal eyes) and use a "magic wand" (a 3D mouse). Several people can enter in the CAVE and view and control 3D animations. One of the most impressive is the one about galaxies merging. You feel you are there, so to speak. Unfortunately, more software is need for these CAVEs.
Maybe like in start trek, we could use these things for games. VR quake anyone?
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
Virginia Tech has also had a CAVE prototype for at least four years... I've used it. It's interesting, but the holodeck is still a LONG ways off.
I wish there was a choice that said "Factually Wrong -1" when I mod.
Popular Science is the tabloid of science magazines. They just report on what's cool, but never stuff that comes to fruition. For example, they talk about light-speed propulsion and other stuff that's total nonsense right now. They're really not a good source for valid science information and technology.
I think that it will be several years before we see this kind of thing in our homes. The CAVE is only a 10x10 room, according to Popular Science. There are a lot of other possiblities for this type of technology, as you can guess. From holographic "batting cages" to holographic video games. This might be an interesting field to be a pioneer in.
"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
didja see the OS poll on popsci page?
it said(when i took their poll)79% were mac users
3% were linux users and the rest were windoze.:(
I realize its a bit off subject,but could we fix
those numbers just a bit guys?
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
WINE Is Not an Emulator, notice how most recursives seem to have the phrase "Is not" in it?
Why not program one of these things for virtual sex? It would be perfect for dorks like me who cant get any :) Although cleanup would be a little difficult and messy though...
That's an interesting concept - I wonder if they simulate tank breakdowns?
First...You dont know the cicumstance i was in...second...I was defending my self and my fellow solider/sailer/airmen...I NEVER onece said i sanctioned WAR plus you sanctomonis ass the people who were aiming those weopons at me must also have been obedient cowards. Go To hell! SIR..
Being an ex-military Fire controll tech let me clue you in on something...They may just apear as images on a scope but in your mind you know that thier is a living being on the recieving end of the weopon you just deployed. They have a mother maybe a wife and kids they are a person just like you...They might even be kids...but that is the burdon of a solider/sailor/airmen...You make it sound like it's something out of the book Ender's Game..let me tell you from first hand experience no matter how it is done it haunts you forever..WAR is never a good thing. But being in the postion to lose one is a worse thing. if this can help keep our troops safe than God bless it!
The last item talks about Parabolic Mirror Projections. It uses lasers and mirrors to actually suspend a hologram in front of their device. I've seen this connected with a Power Glove so that you can actually "manipulate" the image and have it react to you. The example I saw was used to display medical images like a 3D beating heart which you could then turn, flip, zoom, etc. With the connected sound system, it felt like there was a "real" heart right in front of you until you pass your hand through and just feel empty space.
Parabolic Mirror Projections
Laser Magic offers a unique line of Parabolic Mirror Projection devices capable of projecting small objects from one the size of a small green olive up to one the size of a basketball. By using specially designed parabolic mirrors with small objects, the object can be see floating in space above or in front of the display housing. The image is so real you don't believe its not there, yet you can put your hand through it as it floats in space.
The image is formed by two concave mirrors facing one another. When the object is placed at the center of the bottom or back mirror, the mirror's curvature puts the object at the focal point of the top or front mirror but can be seen floating above or in front of the display device.
About a year ago our Siggraph group got a demo of the CAVE at the University of Illinois...one of the developers working on it had, in his spare time, coded a Quake 2 lookalike using textures ripped from the actual game. It was quite well done...turn to the wall to your right, shoot, duck down, and see your POV change as your enemy falls to the ground. Very immersive.
;)
The real question is, how long until CAVE multiplayer?
Well, the problem is that the military has a huge amount of funding to develop new technologies. This is a good thing; without the military/industrial complex our country would probably be a lot worse off today. The fact that many innovations are later applied to the private sector is the _good_ news.
You have to consider a couple of facts:
1) sensitive military developments aren't very useful to the military if everyone knows about them
2) Seldom do doctors, etc, have $10 million+ to blow on experimental training methods.
The fact of the matter is that, using CAVE as an example, this specific virtual reality architecture has almost no applicability to medical science. A medical research group would be foolhardy to invest in it, when better options for training exist. In the same way, who could justify spending that kind of money on teenagers? Have you seen how crowded the DMV usually is? Care to guess how many units you'd need PER CITY?
The government is most concerned with safeguarding its people. Since the bulk of R&D goes on in the military, the output of that is generally military-oriented. Later, much of that technology trickles down.
If, say, the government began developing down other avenues, private industry would start screaming...because the goevernment would be using its relatively-infinte resources to compete with businesses.
This topic has seemingly moved to the topic of FPS as murder simulations, so I feel I have to give my $0.02. In my opinion, only those people that don't have the brains to realize that video games are just that, games, should never have access to a gun the first place. I don't know about the rest of you, but if my FPS experience were to become real, I would die rather quickly, because I'm not the type to run and hide (that's what health is for!). I'd rather sit there and take the spray of bullets and be left at 1 Health and still get the frag, instead of taking off and getting shot in the back. I wouldn't be standing after the first bullet hit in real life. I also have a hard time equating mouse/keyboard or joystick use to the use of a weapon (crowbar, gun, whatever). Wouldn't a true simulation let me use my "Microsoft Force Feedback Crowbar 2000" controller? Bah, this whole topic stinks of ignorance on non-gamer's part...
_______
I just wish I could c:\format Internet
Is this a good thing? I think so. I don't think anybody has any illusions about whether or not war involves killing people. A lot of people in North America have WW2-Vet grandparents, but you don't hear a lot about how grandad is numb to violence. All of these training methods are designed to move war towards a Judo-like idea of finesse and economy of effort being a better approach than massive, overwhelming strength.
I _really_ like the idea of training towards tightly controlled, precision warfare; the phrase "minimum civilian casualties" sounds a lot better to me than "build me a pile of skulls." If a war has to be fought, let it be fought by the warriors, on the battleground. Not by turning schools and suburbs into smoking craters until there's nothing worth defending.
--
Mike Hoye
You guys just like it because CAVE is a recursive acronym... admit it.
Ignore Alien Orders
Sure thing. Makes the job of removing deeply ingrained (socialized and inborn) morals that much easier, since you have to remove less in order to create an efficient killer. OTOH, If the soldiers start really thinking about what theyre doing and escape from the propaganda machine built around them like some kind of max. security prison, some interesting things might start happening....
The truth is out there - we'll let it back in after it sobers up a bit. -The Cube
I have no military experience personally (surprise, surprise) However, I have had several intimate conversations with friends of mine who had just finished training in boot camp (and for the marines, no less). For the record, I do not presume to speak for them. Neither do I Believe that "the military is staffed with golems which only strive to perform whatever task is set forth by commanders?" or that soldiers run around with the deeply held belief that war is not a video game.
However, one of the primary goals of basic military training is to remove and then recreate a large portion of the individual identity for the individual soldiers. Soldiers are essentially robbed of a portion of their individuality and taught (forced?) to think of themelves a s part of a collective; a piece of a greater being then themselves. In addition, In order to actually get someone to kill another on command, a great deal of the morality which has been cultivated throughout the life of the individual (an essential part of their identity) needs to be removed. Nice young boys have to be turned into responsive, efficient killers (maybe they are still nice in most situations, but you must realize that the training programs are deisgned with this goal in mind). One is not an efficient killer if one dwells on the actual thought of killing someone you dont know and has done nothing to you personally on the faith that Somebody Somewhere has a damn good reason(tm) for it(at least, I hope not)
It is easier to make someone feel good about killing someone else if you can remove them form the immediate situation. For an (extreme)example, it would be easier in some to push the little red button of nuclear holocaust than it would be to personally murder each and every one of, say, a million people. Although one understands such deaths intellectually, you feel it less strongly than if you stabbed them to death with your bayonet. I have a friend in the air force who served in the Cheap Gas War, and he has often told me that it is hard to really understand what he is doing when he initiates a launch. He also said he only thinks about it afterward: while he is in the air it is, 'just a job; I move and act almost without thinking' (as somebody else said in a reply to this comment). Of course, this is another goal of the military.
To return to the topic at hand, it seems probable to me that such simulation training, while quite (arguably) capable of producing more efficient killers for less money and personal danger, will only help the officers/ program designers in making war seem more unreal. The very realism of the simulation will work toward this effect-in an actual combat situation, it might seem like 'just another sim.' This is the goal--to make actions that originally have to be carefuly planned and initiated with great moral stress into reflexes.
Therefore it becomes easier to kill. The military wins--better killers, smaller training costs, and more responsive soldiers. I just hope the rest of us arent losing out.
Sory if I seemed a little flippant before-I didnt mean to be misunderstood. If something in your personal experience makes you inclined to disagree, please tell me so that I can reevaluate my position.
Matt
The truth is out there - we'll let it back in after it sobers up a bit. -The Cube
Of course, maybe people dont want to escape from the act of murder. I believe that this is sometimes the case--I have translated acounts of some of the very same roman sooldiers and gladiators you speak of who rather enjoyed killing (or claimed to. Read Caesars account of the war in Gaul, If you are interested. He effectively beat approx. 1E6 gauls with about 25000 legionaires. anyhoo...). If most people actually like to kill as much as our friend Genghis, than you are absolutley correct: There is an eternally equal lack of moral responsibility which is not gonna go away unless we can redesign our basic nature (possible). I choose to believe otherwise, however, and honestly think that if more people experienced the trauma of war firsthand, we would be more inclined to avoid it, our darker impulses and individuals notwithstanding.
I guess it wasnt mostly humor after all....hope you dont think Im too naive. BTW, I have read a little history. Just think that most warriors dont have much of a choice, and were tyrannized by some insanity or person *cough* Warlike Christianity *cough*.
We can do better than history, but we need to make people understand--Feel! just what war-mass murder-really entails.
Matt
The truth is out there - we'll let it back in after it sobers up a bit. -The Cube
OTOH, at least nobody is going to get killed ort injured in these training simulations. And if there is any kind of war in teh near future , simulation programs (on both a -macro and a -micro scale) should help to at least make the battle more efficient (sounds sick, I know) and last a shorter amount of time (maybe even kill less people!!)
As for myself, I definitely think that all war should be fought by the politicians and diplomats presiding over "the peace process" (funny how they call it that), and that all such battles should be fought with battle axes, halberds, and bastard swords. The Beastly combo of 'Haglike' Hillary and 'Clever' Clinton should hold us in good stead. Maybe then international relations will be approached with a little more sanity, less concentration on overt political/economical goals, and more respect towards human life.
Plus, I bet the televised combat would get great ratings on both countries, no matter the winner. You could donate the advertising money spent by the major corporations on humanitarian relief efforts. Plus wed have fewer members of congress and the executive staff. Everybody would win, even if we lost....
The truth is out there - we'll let it back in after it sobers up a bit. -The Cube
"if this thing can help keep our troops safe than God bless it!
but wait... what keeps 'our' troops safe makes 'their' troops unsafe... I guess the big G-- must be on our side, eh?
To that, I can only add that I expect that monkey team to win, place and show in the perl poetry contest, too.
Unfortunately, the military-industrial cycle has served the US quite well for their entire (brief) history, and will probably continue to do so as long as it continues.
Furthermore, the point that sparked this little tirade was that sufficient force of arms is requisite for restraining a violent conquerer, not defense against enemies. Anyone who wants what's yours can be an enemy.
Imagine for instance, the duration of Canadian resistance if the US mounted a modern day invasion. A great deal of the clout the US wields is based on opposing exactly that kind of activity, so this eventuality is unlikely for the moment. But, were it willing, the US could almost certainly annex most of the American continents by force of arms. Where exactly does peace and harmony fit into this picture?
Borders, I think, tend to lead to evil. The abstraction from what's essential, which in this case is the abstraction from my cultural identity to lines on a map that indicate "my" turf, my culture. Much like supply and demand is an abstraction of worth.
IP is just rude.
Is there any torture so subl
The CAVE systems, as shown in the article have been around for a while. Iowa State university has one like it, as do other universities around the country. The ability to link them seems like it should also be a given. I'm really not seeing this as anything even CLOSE to being a holodeck. Until someone can make projections with the ability to be solid, or interact with their environment, I don't think its worthy of /.
From the horses mouth
NIVRAM
if a problem is so intense it requires war, it should be fought with the greatest training and skill, and saying that wars should be low-key only ensures that no problems ever go away.
personally, i advocate physical violence as a complete last resort option, so don't flame me for that, please :-)
Think about that for a second. What you are basically positing here is that whenever you join the military you give up whatever identity you have.
Well, at least that's what the military leaders would like to have.
What it all boils down to is that the military is a job.
A job that consists mainly of training to kill people. Just swell.
Nothing more, nothing less. Having been in the Marines for 11 years I can honestly say that I never met any Marine who's sole goal was to kill defenseless women and children. I can also say that nearly all of the Marines I have ever known were moral and honorable people.
Guess what? I even believe you. It's possible and easy to be a nice, caring guy with morales and honors and be a soldier - if your chances of getting into a real combat situation are close to zero. The situation changes rather drastically when your life really is threatened. Then it will show how much your morales are really worth.
In a real war situation, you inevitable get something like My Lai - your "moral and honorable people" suddenly do kill defenseless women and children.
And this danger is infinitely magnified by technology, because now, you suddenly just have to push a little red button to condemn a million people to death, slow and gruesome for most of them. And all it takes for you is just a little vlountary shortsightedness.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
>Many modern weapons are too expensive to expend in peacetime training. And soldiers are more expensive than that. No matter how much you spend on your killing machine, it's going to be a 25-cent bullet that kills your human solder. What price is put on that human life?
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
Why are we more effective? Glad you asked. You see, while the Americans rely on technology, getting a bigger and better bomb, the Canadians do something a little more time-tested - our troops know what they're doing <gasp!> If you take away an American electronic command post, you've destroyed their operation. You know the one - it sends out signals all over the world, but for some reason nobody can find it? Except, of course, the Canadians. OTOH, the average Canadian foot soldier knows who the enemy is, its weaknesses, etc. because he had to learn them. No reliance on computers - less damage done if a command center gets blown up.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
Then why does it always happen?
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
So what you're saying is that the soldier, who is verifiably a (previously?) living human being, is only worth the money it takes to train him/her?
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
Let's face it, the purpose of an army is to kill people and break things, in pursuit of national interests. When the interests of my nation intersect with those of your nation, we have a problem.
Diplomacy, first, second, third. But when diplomacy fails, I want my countries armed forces to be the best-trained, best-equipped, and most ready force in the world.
I originally saw this in an SGI magazine about 5 years ago ... the Cave was a cubic room with projections on all sides and one of the environments was a world where you created life (plants, butterflies, music) through your movements.
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I originally saw this in an SGI magazine about 5 years ago ... the Cave was a cubic room with projections on all sides and one of the environments was a world where you created life (plants, butterflies, music) through your movements.
;)
Here are a couple of links to the Cave @ SGI: http://www.cio.com/archive/050197_et_content.html
http://www.sgi.com.au/news/cave.html
Very cool, the contact for the second one is in Sydney
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The trend in the virtualization of war is actually the opposite of what you describe.
The idea is: train soldiers with games as realistic as possible now - forget Doom and Quake, we want realistic wounds, entrails hanging on the ground after gutshots...
That way they will get used to not thinking of real people when they kill, and what they will be used to seeing as 'a game' will be as close as possible to what they are going to see in war.
This is one of the stronger arguments I have heard for violent video games as promoting violence - if the U.S. army uses it to make their soldiers into more cold-blooded killers, there's got to be a similar effect on kids.
And it sure does seem strange that I can go to an arcade, and for a few quarters get the same techniques exercised on me that the U.S. army uses to make effective killers, without getting ony of the discipline that also goes into trying to stop them killing civilians...
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
There is already a cave in stockholm and we have been hacking for it for some time now
you will find some suff at:
http://www.pdc.kth.se/projects/vr-cube/
Besides wearing glasses as someone mentioned, you use a "wand" or 3D mouse to control things. When I was working on my master's degree at Tech, I did a project with the CAVE for a class called Computer Supported Cooperative Work. We did some of the first investigations into hooking up multiple CAVEs so that people could collaborate with each other, seeing each other as an avatar in the CAVE. Unfortuntely, the link to the paper is broken, but here is some info on other projects that grew out of that class project.
Animats posted a comment about the problems with the CAVE's corners, while this is noticable, a lot can be done to make it look better. The CAVE software includes corrections that make the images line up at the joints. Its not perfect, but a heck of a lot cheaper than a dome visual.
Most CAVE's have 3 screens and sometimes a floor projection. The new ISU C6 will have screens for all 6 sides of the cube, for total immersion! No its not a Holodeck, but we are getting close!
But, I have thought that wars should be fought using computer games for a long time now. Some kind of advanced simulation, where, if coutries really felt that there was somthing to fight over, they could mobilize their troops to VR caves of sorts, and fight a virtual war.
The results could be made as real as they wanted. For instance, they could have a dual for money for reparations for a crime, or if they were really angry, they would battle over land. The loser of the virtual conflict would give the land in question to the winning side. However, and people that lived there would not be harmed. And would be given the option of moving into the current borders of their country, or staying in the land which is now part of their enemies. However, no phisycal harm would come to them.
Far to idealist to really work, i realize this, and of course, there are many flaws in my train of thought. So, just a thought.
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"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
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"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
personally, i advocate physical violence as a complete last resort option the thing you obviously don't understand from a philosophical/moral standpoint is that violence should not be an option, period (uh-oh, here come the flames...) this comes from the basic moral premise that one should not do harm to another person. of course, there is the infamous retort, well he did it first! but ppl fail to realise that the original premise still must hold--one should never do harm, otherwise the person who claims to hold peaceful values yet is reactionary fails to maintain their peaceful values. the addition of an unjust action to an unjust action does not result in a just action. basic addition and subtraction can tell you this. just a thought
canadaman
-- This sig is.
we have better trained soldiers able to kill better and quicker. I tell you this, I quite happily enjoy the little freedoms I have left, and I'd like to keep them, thank you very much! i would argue that the US military is at a point where it does not need to worry about trying very hard to maintain its OBVIOUS technological supremacy. and you fail to understand that the US brings upon itself this threat of attack exactly because it chooses to maintain such an advance over the other countries. look at canada. we have virtually no military, we don't go around on the world stage bullying people, and lo! could it be? we don't have many enemies, either! maybe it's because we do not prance around on the world stage, shoving our bland, cookie-cutter corporate, amoral culture on everyone. as long as America doesn't get a fucking clue, they will continue in this cycle of the military-industrial complex that will eventually lead to their own destruction.
canadaman
-- This sig is.
Who would care? hey, i would rather be left alone and not be attacked or feel threatened, than have to go kill a bunch of people out of fear of being killed myself. if you would rather go fight and kill people so that you can jump up and down and say 'im the king of the castle, you all have to listen to me now!' then that's what's wrong with america today. if you beleive that humans dying is worth your 'global power and prestige' then your priorities are fucked up beyond repair.
canadaman
-- This sig is.
it is not that we can't afford it, it is that we choose to divert our monetary resources to more important things, like social programs such as our universal healthcare.
and i am not aware of the US govt ever stating that they would protect Canada any more so than they would protect any G7 country. we do not ask for their protection. the vast majority of canadians would like to see _less_ military cooperation with the US. Canada provides some of the best training terrain in the world for all manner of military applications. during WWII and WWI, canada had an incredibly strong military in relation to its total population. here's some trivia for you: at the END of the second world war, the Canadian Navy was larger than the American navy, both in the number of ships and the number of officers.
Also, i think you proved my point: canada as a peacekeeper does more than its share of the global policing responsibility, without the baggage that comes with US peacekeepers abroad--no wonder they like sending canadians to peacekeep, we don't already go in with the people we should be protecting hating us. bottom line: canada operates its military the way its PEOPLE want it to. that is because we are a democracy.
on the other hand, i would venture to say that even if the overwhelming majority of Americans were to ask their govt to cut back on military spending and put some money into social programs, Congress would have none of it.
democracy? phew, what's that? i have the corporate lobby to attend to. a two party system! wow, what a lot of choice american voters have. they can choose between corporate mouthpiece president number one or corporate mouthpiece president number two.
-- This sig is.
now, on to your points:
the appropriateness and inappropriateness of war if you beleive that killing people can ever be 'appropriate', then you have been brainwashed. the most basic tenet of any real moral philosophy is the sanctity of human life. it makes the US look foolish on the world stage when they say to milosevic et al. "don't kill people, killing people is a bad bad thing! hell, we think it's such a bad thing, we are going to send OUR army in and kill YOUR people. basically, they are saying "we will teach you not to kill by killing."... tha's like 'fucking for virginity'... it just makes no sense.
we are the defacto policeman of the world heh, tha's a good one. so basically, the US is hypocritical once again: by this logic, you have completely destroyed the notion of the soveriegn nation-state. so when the US complains about unfair trade practices or illegal immigrants, they are coming from the standpoint of: we can go anywhere in the world and do anything to anyone we want, but if anybody tries to do that to us, well, we'll just have to kill/sanction/brainwash them.
reduce the cost of war (in terms of casulties on both our side and theirs) how is training your army to be more effective at killing going to reduce the number of casualties, you nitwit! it might reduce the financial cost of war for you, but tha's about it.
you are going to have two choices why only two? you mean only two that you can think of... there's things like diplomacy, sanctions, the UN war crimes tribunal, etc. now, i don't have a problem if some highly highly skilled commandos capture these murderers so that they can stand trial in a court of law (what a new-age thought!) but, again, fighting to end some fighting makes you look like an idiot.
But having the biggest and baddest army in the world maximizes the chance that when I go to sleep tonight, death squads won't break into my house and murder my wife as she sleeps next to me. well, this is just wrong again. it is not your army that protects you from domestic deathsquads (i didn't know that was a problem in the states, i guess i'll have to look for them next time i'm down there), it would be your local police dept, as far as i can tell. of course, if you were a little more widely read even of your own citizens' writing, you would know that many of the worst deathsquads in history were armed and trained by the US military. grab some chomsky and re-assess your ideas of the nation-state.
canadaman
-- This sig is.
It should be noted that Brown University also has a CAVE (although I'm not sure if they use the same name). They've had it for about a year.
:(
They actually pay people to come in and use the thing, so they can watch you and "test" the software - although I must admit I haven't yet had a chance to get over there and do some of this "testing," unfortunately.
Their website doesn't seem to be very extensive, but it does have some information:
http://www.cs.brown.edu/re search/graphics/research/cave/
More fundamentally, other than showing ride films and simulating shooting people, there's not much you can usefully do with the things. Like most VR, it's a technology in search of a killer app. High-resolution wide-screen videoconferencing, maybe?
(Hmm. As a technical concept, high-resolution (HDTV/SVGA or better) wide-screen video conferencing over wideband Internet connections might work. When the camera is fixed and the background is static, video bandwidth is relatively modest. "Relatively" is the operative word here; about 10Mb/sec is probably needed, although you wouldn't fill the pipe all the time.)
Thanks to our current anathema for letting soldiers get killed in action as opposed to innocent civilians through the use of less discriminate methods, most western military casualties die in training. If more of the training is virtual, less soldiers will die/be incapacitated, which is a good thing not only from the soldiers' point of view but also from the taxpayers'. Which might go some way to balancing out the expense of installation.
I also hope it will teach pilots to spot when a target is hostile and when it is (a) a train loaded with Serb civilians (b) a Kosovan refugee column or (c) British troops.
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
Thanks to our current anathema for letting soldiers get killed in action as opposed to innocent civilians through the use of less discriminate methods, most western military casualties die in training. If more of the training is virtual, less soldiers will die/be incapacitated, which is a good thing not only from the soldiers' point of view but also from the taxpayers'. Which might go some way to balancing out the expense of installation.
I also hope it will teach pilots to spot when a target is hostile and when it is (a) a train loaded with Serb civilians (b) a Kosovan refugee column or (c) British troops.
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
Military action does have its place, but only when authorised by the United Nations Security Council or in self-defence. Otherwise it's illegal. And almost invariably immoral.
The use of force which you defended in Kosovo was illegal, contravening the UN charter (which has the stipulations described above), and the NATO treaty (which said that NATO could only use force in defence of one of its own member states). The method of force was also illegal - cluster bombs (of which about 350 were used) are against the Geneva Convention.
Do you believe that the 'end', which in this case NATO claimed was an end to the persecution of the Kosovans by Milosevic, justified breaking international law? If the outcome had been positive, you might perhaps have had a point. Instead, the bombing killed 2000 Serb civilians, between 500 and 1500 Serb troops, a large number of Kosovan civilians, triggered the massive escalation of Serbian persecution of the Kosovans and caused a huge refugee exodus. Even today the vioence hasn't ended, except now instead of Serbians doing the persecution, it's the Kosovans who are killing, assaulting, robbing and driving away the Serbs and Roma. They also cannot be held to blame, as this whole situation was preventable in the first place, as I will go on to describe.
The Serbs had agreed to crucial points in the Rembrouillet agreement before the war which would have put an end to the persecution. However, NATO then added some unacceptable demands, such as what amounted to the full NATO occupation of Serbia (or possibly Yugoslavia - I forget whether Montenegro was mentioned). When Milosevic refused, the bombing began.
I will finish by paraphrasing (since I forget the exact quote) Nelson Mandela, who said that NATO and Milosevic were equally at fault. It's time that we saw his point.
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
Did you see the Simpson's episode with the monkey's paw?
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
The funny thing about NATO's involvement with Kosovo was that, as well as being illegal, immoral, setting a dangerous precedent, and slaughtering innocent civilians, it also cost $50,000 apiece for every man, woman and child living there. A big chunk of that was spent by the USA, so in the end the country didn't profit from it. The only people who did were the military as conflicts justify further spending. Maybe the Kosovo taught NATO countries that they should think a little more next time? Well, in that case it clearly gave every pig in the world a pair of wings too - can't you see them?
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
Personally, I think that the US has to look at its track record for killing civilians, directly and indirectly, through its military action. Looking at a more recent topic (which if you look at my other posts you'll see is on my mind today) the US refusal to risk their bombers in Kosovo by using them in a way that helped accuracy ensured that at least one train loaded with civilians were hit (to justify this accident, NATO doubled the speed of the tape to make it understandable that the pilot hadn't seen the train coming), a convoy of Kosovo refugees was bombed with an estimated 70 to 75 casualties, and the wrong country was sometimes hit.
As an aside, if NATO hadn't gone to war in Kosovo, I personally believe that the situation could have been settled at the negotiation table, owing to some crucial parts of the Rembrouillet Agreement which had been signed by both parties.
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
Blah. People are so smart weve made an art of killing each other. It is an art isnt it? I mean every other species on the planet is so un-civil they dont go about killing each other off in mass numbers. I wish I could have been a less thinking creature. Ive been through things as a person that would be dealt with as an instinct if I were less of a being. Instead as a person you suffer through stuff every day because were so smart? I hate all of the assumed rights people take. I hate where life in general for people is going. I wish for a much more simpler time that wont ever come for anyone unless the nukes fly and most of humanity is lost (is this a bad thing?) Bleh. We make ourselves better killers of humanity every day. It does not take warfare. Just good natured over consumption and environmental devestation that you dont have to worry about. What CAN you do? I dont care, wish it werent true but I dont.
This seems far from Star Trek's holodeck and much more like the Cyberworld of Snow Crash and even William Gibson's Matrix. One of the main features of the holodeck was that the users were able to physically interact with the generated environment, ie they could sit down on a generated chair without falling on their butts.
The image on the special goggles and so forth seems much more like the laser projection on the goggles featured in Snow Crash. I am sure it is only a decade before this is how games like Quake and Unreal are played. Also chat rooms and pornography will probably come right after that, if not before.
I don't think we should worry about the potential military uses so much as these uses. If the modern interactive world draws people into it, so that they ignore the real world, how much more will this full immersion affect people?
"Politics is for the moment, an equation lasts eternity" -A. Einstein
Looks like we're still a ways away from a holodeck, until they work out force fields, so you can imitate a chair with a force field. Can't see it working any other way. Otherwise we're limited to imitating cars, planes, etc where you don't walk around.
Never found that those VR goggles worked for me. Since I only see through one eye, I judge distance by eye focus. The VR screen can't do that yet, so it never really got me immersed. Quite apart from the generally lousy resolution.
What we want is a very high-res display with something which monitors your eyeball activity. Then it can sharpen the images at the depth you're focussing at, and blur the images at other depths. That'll give true VR. Trouble is, we're going to want something several orders of magnitude better resolution than any current LCDs.
As a followup, did anyone see Tomorrow's World (BBC) a couple of weeks back? They had a gadget which passed very small currents into the side of your head to fool your inner ear, so it feels like you're moving even though you're not. They did a demo with a group of kids, and managed to get a couple of them totally off-balance so they had to catch them b4 they fell over!
Grab.
Think 3D environment with LCD shutter goggles.
Course I'll only ever be impressed by VR when I can do real-time, fully immersive, 3D fractal fly-throughs :)
What we need is some VERY big fat flat guy with a baseball bat representing one of the sides in the cave... whenever you need the "real" sense of touching or hitting an obstacle.. WHAM!.. he swings the bat..
:)
hmm.. he would be pretty hard to project from the back??.. perhaps if we cover him with a thin layer of glycerin.,. that has a very nasty refraction index
I'm sure the UK has experimenting with this sort of thing for training for a while now.
I just remeber reading an article about it, and the complaints that the Americans always refused to play the role of the Russians.
It is really horrible that any major innovation that the United States government has is immediately used to either kill people or find a way to kill people before it is used to help society.
There are many examples of this (the department of energy laboratory at Los Alamos rings a bell,) and this continuing trend makes me sick.
This unit could be used to train doctors, or teach teenagers to drive, but instead, our government is using it to develop new weapons. Great.
Is there some unwritten rule that any advance in technology must assist in the killing of at least 100,000 people before it can be helpful to society?
-ShelbyCobra
Living life in the right side of the s-plane
Somewhere there is a planet where all the people live in complete piece and harmony. Where no one fights anyone else. Where no one even knows what a weapon is. I want to find that planet, because it sure would be easy to take over.
-- Never make a general statement.
The most useless, worst waste of money in the world is an army that comes in second.
If you would have piece, train for war.
-- Never make a general statement.
I'd love to see the boys at State when they see the /. effect from this post. We've had CAVE at Mississippi State University for some time now. Believe it or not, Mississippi is a technological hotspot in the nation. I've included a link to LOTS of documentation concerning the programming and abilities of the CAVE system. Yeah, I know some of you Mississippians are pissed at me now for the redneck comment but I'm a native and MSU alumni so I can say stuff like that--being a fellow redneck. Check out what's below. There are some VERY cool pics and movies of what they are producing. MSU has worked for a long time on top secret government projects including the air force and NASA. I'm sure they are in on the announcement in some form or fashion. http://search.ur.msstate.edu/cgi-bin/htsearch http://www.erc.msstate.edu/~watson/CLASS/CAVE/ http://www.erc.msstate.edu/~achupa/cave.html
--Kline
*Sigh*
I read Ender's Game more than ten years ago. Technology like this is only bringing it nearer to reality.
War isn't some game - it's women and children screaming and dying in their own body waste, it's families being torn apart and never seeing each other again, it's being forced to beat your neighbor because they're a different race from you.
And the U.S. Army wants to make it into a video game.
Do you not see how you're contradicting yourself? You say:
Realistic training is vital for combat effectiveness and survival.
Yet you continue on by saying:
The advantages of virtual reality simulations are cost and safety.
Virtual training is not realistic, and war is neither cheap nor safe.
I think this is all part of the "virtualizing" of war. Think back to the Gulf War, with all those videos from the video-guided bombs as they home in on the target. It doesn't feel like they're actually killing people, does it?
I'm willing to bet that people who've been trained in machines like this one don't see it as training for killing - it's all just a big video game, right? Doesn't hurt anyone, right?
How long will it take before they start representing "targets" as icons rather than real video? "I just wiped out three of those blinking blue squares - what do you suppose they were?"
Yeah, let's fight a war where one side never has to see any blood, and all the bleeding's done by the other side. Go, U.S. Army! You guys must be real proud of your achievements.
Build a virtual interface that'll let guys dingle Natalie Portman's labia major and you'll sell a billion units... I'll be buying one when its available
Virtual Quake 3
pr0n
sleep(nah, we want the real thing)
The list can go on forever.
A few years ago I went with an ACM group to visit the University of Illinois in Urbana. While we were there, we took a tour of their R&D facilities which included a C.A.V.E.
If i remember correctly, they did say something about the Army being interested in their research.
Check this out: http://www.vrac.iastate.edu/new/c6page.html Iowa State University is building a fully-immersive CAVE called the C6. The normal configuration just has 3 walls and a floor. You can see the commercial version at: http://www.pyramidsystems.com/products.html
I used to work at Argonne and I remember research being done there with this very same thing about 5 years ago or so. I found a couple of old articles on the Argonne site mentioning it:
3-D Science Scene
VIRTUAL REALITY ENVIRONMENT OFFERS NEW INSIGHTS INTO THE DYNAMICS OF COMPLEX SCIENTIFIC PHENOMENA
Hello-
I'm seeing many strange things posted here about
the NCSA CAVE. I actually work with it, so here is some perspective.
First, the CAVE was developed with NCSA and EVL
(electronics visualization laboratory, at the University of Illinois in CHicago), with much help from SGI. It was NOT developed by the US Army.
The acronym is recursive, but it is also a reference to Plato - inferring reality from the shadows on the wall of a (rock) cave.
This is very, very far from novel technology now.
I believe that it was actually 8 years ago that the CAVE was installed (NCSA having the first).
Nowadays there are 25+ CAVE's around - and not just in academic settings. I believe Pixar has a CAVE, to do 3D modelling work.
There are 25+ CAVEs in the world, as well as hundreds of ImmersaDesks (which have the same features as the CAVEs, but have screens only the size of a large drafting table). In fact, anyone can buy one through Pyramid Systems. The original CAVE was ~1,000,000 dollars.
The US Army is interested in 3D simulations using the CAVE. I've seen one app, but I actually have no idea how it is being used, and I don't want to start any conspiracy theories. It did look more innocuous than some people are theorizing.
The CAVE has been used for (and still is):
Hydrology visualisation,
Vis. of the formation of galaxies,
Vis. of network traffic flow,
Simulating earth moving equipment (i.e. CAT),
Choreographing computer generated movies,
and as a tool for math visualization.
And yes, it does have Quake.
The CAVE does provide a sterescopic 3D experience, and allows tracking of several sensors (normally head and a hand carried wans), each of which reports position and rotation about all 3 axes.
Ours has 4 walls. Octaphonic sound is availible too.
Some CAVE's have all 6 walls, force-feedback datagloves, and higher resolution than ours.
One last thing. The CAVE is a beast, an old beast. It is a wonderfully cool place to work, but nowadays with a linux cluster and some nice (over the counter) graphics hardware, there will soon be many more opportunities availible for drastically less money (In fact, one goup here at UIUC is working on a linux cluster version). The CAVE and
it's 4 InfiniteReality engines still screams along, but the alternatives are very quickly catching up.
For more tech specs, i'll write a different entry.
Kinda Cool. Could use some definate improvement. I know that those LCD shutter glasses have a tendancy to give some people headaches. They could use polarization to overcome that shortcomming. AND why not all 4 sides arround the user? Plus floor and cieling? That would make it complete. Well not complete, complete is StarTrek's Holodeck!
- Love all computers...
Well, horray for the US, makin a holodeck that will cost a lot of money (taxes?) and not be open to the public until the 24th century when we're roaming space in star ships.