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.

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.