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Inside the Tuna Can

Posted by michael on from the chunk-light dept.

blackcoot writes "Now folks walking through MIT's Infinite Corridor get to play with the virtual fishies (they react based on sensor data). I don't know if this will end up looking much nicer than the fish tank that used to come with MS Plus back in the day, but anything that requires months of computation to calculate just the raw data is cool in my book."

3 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. Re:cool? by Harald+Paulsen · · Score: 5, Informative

    This may look completely useless to you, but read the article and the MIT website again. This system will be a playground for research releated to propulsion in water, and the long term results could give more efficient boats and submarines, that move more like fish.

    There are a lot of things in nature that looks simple, yet we still can't mimic good enough. How birds fly, fish swim and snakes crawl are some of them.

    --
    Harald
  2. Sounds like El-Fish by SWroclawski · · Score: 4, Informative
    This reminds me of the old DOS game El-Fish (some information on the game can be found at) http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/8350/ . In the game, you bred fish and then you had to "render" them. On my old 286, this took hours. Since this was DOS, that meant the computer had to be used for hours just to "render" the fish.

    The more things change, the more they stay the same.

    - Serge Wroclawski

  3. I miss my Mac... by madgeorge · · Score: 4, Informative
    In college I was known as a fish killer. (I couldn't keep the "ultimate in disposable pet technology" living for more than a week or so.) But I fixed that at the end of my freshman year by buying a shiny new Mac LCII and El-Fish, a collaboration between makers of all things Sims, Maxis Software, and Russian research group AnimaTek. It was an absolutely beautiful product, producing not that spectacular graphics, but absolutely astounding motion for a decade ago. 1 million times cooler than Microsoft's scrensaver, and loads more fun since you could catch and breed your own fish.

    Watching real fish move gracefully through a tank is one of the greatest pleasures in life. You can easily zone out for an hour or so just staring at the tank. El-Fish was almost as captivating. Cheers to anyone who tries to improve on that early effort.

    --madgeorge