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?

[balloonhead]

I would disagree in part - it sounds from the article that this is fairly heavy-duty computational theory, with lot of real-world application in boat manufacture and design.

However, I agree with your criticism of the students themselves

"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."

Sounds sort of like the village idiot speaking.

That's what makes fish so cool? Uber-l33t fish. What next?

Re:Bored?

[ergonal]

Yeah, but according to the article it's a $30k grant from Microsoft Research/MIT iCampus. I wonder how much the MIT contribution is? The article also says that they're trying to get the displays (~$16k worth, according to them) donated, which does seems feasible, so it's chicken feed really.

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?

[le_jfs]

"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."

That's what makes fish so cool? Uber-l33t fish. What next?

I agree with you! This is what makes fishes look cool.

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?

[slustbader]

iCampus is an affiliation between MIT and Microsoft, but Microsoft provides the funding. Microsoft will supply up to $30,000 for each approved project. The project can still get outside funding, but most of the projects I've seen or read about haven't needed to (most don't even need the fully $30K). Check out http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/projects/icampus/index .html.

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.

And in few years:

[Krapangor]

Sony announces Flippo the first mechanical dolphin.
Très useful.

months of computation

[jo_ham]

It takes me months of compuutation just to work out my taxes, and there's nowt cool about that.

Re:cool?

[Harald Paulsen]

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.

Sharks

[Timesprout]

Unlike other simulated fish, the iQuarium's scaly denizens will be driven by the same forces that manipulate birds and fish in nature,

I reckon they should throw in a few great whites if they want people walking down the corridor to have an experience

Halloween prank

[Harald Paulsen]

I can't wait to see the possibilites for pranks with this system. For halloween there will be monsters on the other side of the wall peaking in whenever someone approaches. Or what about some max headrooms? :-)

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.

Now if only....

[doogieb]

.... they could do the maths to work out how to realistically show a toaster flying... ;>

Cleaning?

[sploxx]

Would be interesting to know what the result of cleaning using magnetic aquarium cleaners is :)

Sounds like El-Fish

[SWroclawski]

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

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:security

[karlm]

Yup, the Infinate Corridor is open 24/7, but at least every couple of minutes you have some weary student or custodial staff member in some part of the corridor.

There's a small computer lab just of the infinate that has an electronic (not Simplex) pushbutton lock. It has a large floor-to-cieling set of windows and is affectionately called the "fishbowl" due to your abilty to observe the students in the lab from the Infinate Corridor. My guess is that they'll either make a sturdy display case or put it inside the fish bowl, facing outwards. MIT students also have better things to do that mindlessly destroy MIT property. Occasionally they accidently ruin some alarm sensor they were trying to bypass, but vandalism is pretty rare and theft is somewhat rare.

Breaking and entering with intent to create something creaive and easily removable is about the most the average MIT student is willing to risk getting kicked out of MIT for.

Re:cool?

[Timesprout]

Unquestionably animal movement is more sophisticated than any currently available mechanical movement or propulsion systems. Its debatable though how useful mimicing this sort of movement is in real world vehicles would be.
Take aircraft for example. They are faster but less agile than birds. In transport terms though we really only want them to fly in straight lines from A to B so agility is not an overwhelming consideration in their construction. If we want them to be more efficient we make them lighter and more aerodynamic.
Undoubtably there are niche requirements that will benefit from this sort of research but I doubt the ability to product ships that move like fish (my god think of the sea sickness from the motion of the waves AND the ship itself) will revolutionize transport.

False Advertising

[spoonist]

... one-sixth-mile-long Infinite Corridor.

Geez... whatever happened to truth in advertising?

What's next? A "Mobius Corridor" that dead-ends?

I miss my Mac...

[madgeorge]

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

Re:I miss my Mac...

[br0ck]

Things have improved since those days. Check out some screenshots of Matrox's reef demo by scrolling to the bottom of this page. There's instructions there to get it working with other video cards.

Oohhh, look at all the pretty colors

[lateralus]

From MIT's IQuarium FAQ: "...Having a combined virtual lab on the Infinite Corridor has these advantages: - Because it is large, colorful, inviting, and fun, it will excite people and attract attention..."

I can see it now; A professor stands in front of the class and begins his lecture:

"Modern science doesn't have to be all boring numbers, bridges and wires. Today we will learn how to make FUN and EXCITING stuff. Be sure to make it COLORFUL and LARGE otherwise investors will take their money else ware!"

What's next, rides? "I'm sorry Timmy, you have to be This High to ride the particle accelerator."

Police, coming through!

[Anonymous Coward]

Visitors can also use a wall-mounted control panel to manipulate the fish..
And then the fish (intelligent as they are) calls 911 and gets the visitors charged for rape.

Am I suppose to be funny?

heh

[odyrithm]

but anything that requires months of computation to calculate just the raw data is cool in my book

your like my girlfriend then.. I still aint figured her out. ;)

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.

Re:cool?

[addaon]

Half of all Americans have below average intelligence.

Do you have a source for this? Half are below median intelligence, I'm sure, but mean? Or is your confusion of the two just evidence of your categorization?

Re:PARENT = GAYEST POST SO FAR TODAY

[odyrithm]

Anonymous, Homophobic.. look whos talking "in fact".

Microsoft's Most Generous Contribution.

[titaniam]

I know no facts, this is conjecture: They say the project is funded by Microsoft, which is only a fraction of the story. I'd guess there are a couple of people working on this project, and a hell of a lot of computer time. Figure $100-200k per person (includes pay, tuition, university claimed overhead, etc). Figure $50-100k for the computers or computer time (including costs for administrator?). Microsoft's contribution is nothing, and in reality is probably "market value of zero cost donated software", with a possible condition or expectation that the pretty fish tanks have prettier butterflies pasted onto the corners. That said, the project is real cool, and does have scientific merit in my opinion, as the goal is modeling the actual movement mechanism of fish in a virtual 3-D tank. The added benefit is the projection to 2-D on the corridor walls. And by the way, we're talking a very small section of the corridor, right?

Math is good but Nature is better

[w3weasel]

The need for all those massive calculations has been under debate within the robot builders community for some time.

By using simple analog components from transistor radios and similar hardware, some robotic engineers have built robots that learn on their own 'how' to walk. The movements are never pre-programmed, the robot is just given a simple goal like 'move foreward'. It is then up to the robot to 'learn' what actions best meet that goal.

Seems like this technology applied to Robotuna would be a no-brainer. I wonder if they have considered this approach.

Similar project: view from a fish's perspective

[My Third Account]

An engineering professor at UC Berkeley created a project that uses video cameras to track the position of fish in a tank, then a projector projects onto a nearby wall what the view looks like from one of the fish.

Pretty slick combination of engineering and art.

The article glossed over some of the details

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything that propels itself through water creates vortices - it's unavoidable. With propellers, the vortices create drag. With fish, the vorticies create thrust. So fish are more efficient swimmers than propellers. That's what makes them cool.

$16000

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anyone else notice the bit that states that it will cost 'em $16,000 for enough 5ft X 2.5ft flat panels to cover all of the surfaces in a 1/6 mile corridor? That sounds absurdly cheap for flat panels of that size.