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: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.

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? :-)

Now if only....

[doogieb]

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