Inside the Tuna Can

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."

Comments

Bored?

[Omikr0n]

--quote--

Short, basic moves should take only a few hours to parse, said Qiang Zhu, a research engineer at the vortical flow lab, and one of the FLEX3D programmers. Long, slow turns, however, may take several days.

"But the net effect should be a more realistic movement of the fish than what you see in a screensaver, for example," he said.

But FLEX3D will yield only numerical data for the flow fields and vortices created by each move. After that, it's up to the iQuarium investigators to bring their virtual fish tank to life.

"That part actually shouldn't be too difficult," said Aaron Sokoloski, a mechanical engineering student in the School of Engineering. Sokoloski said he will be using C++ and Microsoft's Direct3D graphics software to model the fish for iQuarium

--quote--

These students are paying top tution dollars and ahve access to some of the most powerful equipment available to what? That's right. Make a giant SCREEN SAVER that "looks pretty".

Proof that students have waaaaaaaaay too much time on their hands.

Re:Bored?

[evilviper]

with lot of real-world application in boat manufacture and design.

No, according to the article, they already know how fish move, and this load of computing power is going to recreating that movement, NOT studying it.

Imagine recreating the movements of people in a city. Recording those movements, and analyzing them would be scientificatlly benefitical... but using a supercomputer to duplicate them would be a hi-tech parlor trick, not research.

Re:Bored?

[balloonhead]

My guess is that a grant from the US navy does not come from duplication alone. The screensaver is just eye-candy to raise awareness, do something cool, whatever - the actual aims of the entire project are more wide-ranging.

Re:Bored?

[thdexter]

Just because it's a technical university doesn't mean art doesn't have a place. I'd rather walk through there than I would walk through Omikr0n's Huge Grey Windowless Towers of Doom and Efficiency, myself.

Re:Bored?

[aWalrus]

Exactly. And I imagine MIT gets a kick out of these things. Think about it: It's in their best interest that cool, showy, if not always useful, projects like these get made by their students. It all adds to the MIT's perceived spirit. The rest of the world sees them as the cool tech types that delve into all sorts of weird stuff, and therefore think MIT must be an incredible place (which maybe it is).

A friend of mine went to study there and worked in the Math labs. He told me most of the really useful investigation took place in the lesser known labs of the university, yet the Media Lab is exactly that, a Media darling, so they get the spotlight. This is not a bad thing. It is a neccessity, and MIT benefits from seemingly frivolous projects like this one.

Interesting...

[evilviper]

in MIT's famous one-sixth-mile-long Infinite Corridor.

Talk about inflation! Geez!

"Fish create vortices, which are like teeny whirlpools," she said. "And the vortices create changes in water pressure that move the fish forward. That's what makes fish so cool."

Oh really??? So *THAT* is what makes fish cool, eh? I had been going on the shiny, colorful, moving object theory up until now.

Short, basic moves should take only a few hours to parse, said Qiang Zhu, a research engineer at the vortical flow lab, and one of the FLEX3D programmers. Long, slow turns, however, may take several days.
"But the net effect should be a more realistic movement of the fish than what you see in a screensaver, for example," he said.

I see, so incredible ammounts of number-crunching power are going, not to research of anything important, but to making a large, 3D, screensaver. Well, as long as Microsoft's money is paying for it, what the heck.

security

[Evil Adrian]

AFAIK, the Infinite Corridor is open 24/7... are they going to have to beef up security to ensure none of the plasma screens get damaged/stolen, or do the people up there generally behave and not destroy things for fun like at other colleges?

Re:cool?

[AnriL]

Another deceptively simple thing is just trying to keep your balance while walking on two legs. Getting a robot to do that is not as easy as it looks in cheesy SF flicks.