Weird Science Offered As University Class

ludwigvan968 writes "The ACTLab at the University of Texas at Austin is making waves with its Weird Science class. The link is to the TA's blog with documentation of some of the projects: a laser harp, a 3D environment constructed with fog and an LCD projector, and a 'water bridge' using a 50,000-volt transformer. Next semester, they're introducing a new class called 'Disruptive Technologies.'"

Comments

Laser harp?

[davidsyes]

Talk about cutting edge music. Hopefully it's not "ear-splitting" music...

Truly disruptive technology might be an "intestinal auger" with rheostat. Somehow, I suppose the FDA won't allow that piece of equipment to be added to the body...

3D Fog Environments

[Bones3D_mac]

This is something I've found kind of interesting ever since I first heard of it a couple years ago. However, we may not be limited to simply looking much longer. For example, a newer application of the Wii Remote that allows users to convert any display into a digital white board could allow fog display users to directly manipulate both the fog and the image being projected over the affected area simultaneously, making it possible to do things like carve directly into the display itself. (Though, much of it may initially come off as a gimmick similar to some of Apple's interactive quicktime movie demos, such as realtime water ripples created on mouseclicks.)

Eventually, I'd love to see a way to do this that doesn't require the fog, like maybe using lasers to intersect at a single point in 3D space in such a way that the polarization reflects the light back to the viewer at that point, while remaining invisible elsewhere.

Re:3D Fog Environments

[CryoPenguin]

Eventually, I'd love to see a way to do this that doesn't require the fog, like maybe using lasers to intersect at a single point in 3D space in such a way that the polarization reflects the light back to the viewer at that point, while remaining invisible elsewhere.

Photons don't interact with photons. It doesn't matter whether it's lased, polarized, or whatever; two or more beams of light will just pass through each other.
(This is also, btw, why photons aren't regularly used as qubits in a quantum computer. It's easy to make them coherent, but you can't compute anything if your qubits don't interact.)

Re:3D Fog Environments

[JohnFluxx]

Actually that's not quite true - photons can bounce off each other. It's just rare.

On a different note, what you can do is have the beams have enough energy density to be close to breaking down the air. Then where they intersect there will be enough energy to break down the air and create a plasma. This will be a reflective point. It's kinda loud though.

Disruptive techonogies is a real area of study

[Raul654]

Disruptive technologies is a very real area of study. Supercomputing 2006 and 2007 even had a panel on it. (My phd adviser is one of the people listed there) Although somewhat buzz-wordy, the idea is to signify technologies that have the potential to bring about great change within an industry.

Just to name one kind of such technology for computing, if someone could get automatic parallelization to work reliably, that would be a very disruptive technology. (20 years of research has yet to achieve this, but people keep trying)