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This is daily planet
Today, in less than one hundred
million pixles, this virtual reality room has the highest of resolution in the
world.
The rides are being used to design a better cotton picker.
Plus, scanning a mummy to solve a mystery. Is this acnient Egyptian a man or
a woman?
Or is it who anthropologists think it is? One scan will set the record straight.
And building the UK's most powerful nuclear submarine ever.
We're gonna find out how computer assisted design is changing
how these machines are made.
Hey, welcome to Daily Planet, I'm
Kim Jagtiani and also on the show today
we're gonna hear about one man's plans to head to the north pole on a sled on a two
thousand kilometer journey
measuring ice
all along the way.
We're also gonna warm things up by bringing a powerful heat lamp into the studio
and show you how new coating for windows can actually
help keep heat out. But we kicked things off by stepping into a six sided
cube
that looks more like an immersive video game than anything else but
it's a lot more than that.
This computer room is much different than any have ever been in before.
Like no other room on the planet,
It's the highest resolution display, immersive display device in the world
but almost a hundred million pixels.
All four walls, the ceiling and the floor have every last centimeter covered with
video.
They call it the six-sided cave-
C-6
Humans can process
mass amounts of information
if it's presented in very sensible, organized way and we feel 3-D virtual
reality is a way to do that. When we're in the real world,
you don't have you know huge blind spots. It's not like you can only see this little field of
you in front of you you can see all around you so
we're trying to mimic that in the virtual world.
That video on the wall is made by a digital projector designed for a movie
theater.
Four of them are needed for each wall.
That's a total of twenty-four projectors at more than a hundred thousand dollars
each
but the design of the room is the trickiest part.
Look at the floor.
It's a movie screen that people are going to walk on.
They have a transparent surface that's also a strong enough and
durable enough to support multiple people inside the environment.
Many also have to have that elevated enough so they can project
from underneath there
and that's why this facility is as tall as it is
so that they can get projectors underneath as well as projectors from
above projecting onto the ceiling. Looks like the ultimate video game system,
right?
It's actually designed for much more serious work. We experienced the world as
three-d_
because we're trying to make decisions about the world making decisions and
three d is a lot better way to do it.
What we have here as we've been using this to design a number of their
products.They were looking at cotton pickers.
Yep, the most advanced virtual reality room in the planet was being used to
create a better cotton picking machine. The challenge is that we want to pick the
cotton up off the ground,
we put it into a small cotton
conveying system
that takes it back to the basket.
See, what's happening is you're getting a recirculation region where it separates them
and that starts to close off that duct. And so what we did then, we
moved that around
and said what happens when I change this?
The time spent in the C-6 has paid off. We reduce the energy costs
of this by about twenty-five percent,
we increase the flow it by about twenty-five percent, we've increased the
suction that's picking up the conflict less likely to plug. And it's a lot quicker than
welding it together testing it out, and seeing whether you liked it or not.
There's even more stuff down on the farm than using the C-6 for. Things
you'd never guess. So what we're looking at here
is we're looking at a hog enclosure. This is a typical hog enclosure
and the questions are, "How do we design the fans and the ventilation system
to take the best possible care of the hogs?" Immediately we see
we've got this problem
with this recirculation region in here.
It's like playing a game. You can have a game of design the hog shelter and get it
right
and then you can go build it for real. Engineers aren't only using this multi
million dollar marble for cotton
and pigs,
it's also being used for life-and-death situations like war zones.
We call the battle space and this application allows me to do commanding
control
for a large air military engagement.
While they're flying these over in iraq and afghanistan right now, the pilots are in
Las Vegas. Here, I can look at thousands of square miles
and we would call it a God's eye view. Any intelligence
that we gather time as the game is taking place can be fed into the simulation but
our vision is that you control swarms of these things hundreds thousands of them
final things.
There's no
other way to do this right now.
It's not all so serious, the c six can be used for fun and games too.
In this one,
the viewer flies right inside the cells of a plant.
This is a soy bean cell. The
problem is that there's been a virus came from Europa
and it's infected all the plants, all plants are dead
except there's one plant living and actually in that plant, there's only one living cell.
And so the player
is gonna have to go inside the cell and save it. So
this green thing is a Cleopatra. There's a starch thing right there. You can see in the background the membrane.
Maybe saving this plant will even teach students a thing or two. You can
read that in a textbook, it's not that exciting, but if you're playing that in a video game, wow
In this new C-6
in particular it's amazing because I've never been inside a cell.
I think that kids can learn
a lot more biology
than just from a textbook.
For engineers who really want to take the plunge into another world,
these three-d_ goggles make the whole experience even more surreal.
The user end users see the three-d_ effect when they're wearing a pair of these
three-d_ glasses which basically have the ability to shutter one eye or the
other
and we think that with filters that are installed on the projectors, they also
blocked the one projector, the left eye projector or the right eye projector
and it does this all faster than your mind can tell.
So as far as your mind is concerned, you are seeing three-dimensional images.
We frequently have people that are bouncing into the walls. One of the ideals
with the C-6 is you don't have to rotate the world which breaks your
realism,
you rotate as you normally would inside the real world so you can get in here
you can get turned around you have no idea which is the door which was the front
screen or where you came in.
You change the pitch angle of something and I see, how is that different?
Does it have more lift?
Is it blowing more dust around, is it picking up more cotton?
Because you can't really figure out the dimensions unless you experience it like you
experience life.
Looking at a picture doesn't tell you how close things are together. Standing
between them in three d does.