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Technology

Inside the Tuna Can 95

Posted by michael from the chunk-light dept.
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."
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Inside the Tuna Can More

Inside the Tuna Can

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  • Bored? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Omikr0n ( 656115 ) on Saturday March 08, 2003 @08:40AM (#5466529)
    --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? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by balloonhead ( 589759 )
      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? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by evilviper ( 135110 )
        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? (Score:3, Insightful)

          by balloonhead ( 589759 )
          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? (Score:3, Insightful)

            by aWalrus ( 239802 )
            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.

      • Re:Bored? (Score:2, Funny)

        by le_jfs ( 627582 )
        "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 [geocities.com] is what makes fishes look cool.

      • Re:Bored? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by thdexter ( 239625 )
        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.
      • the truth is that this display won't look real. It will look like a computer. Watching real fish you can perceive the depth and you can move and see another side of the fish. I admit this will look pretty cool, but it will be obvious that it's not real.

      • The article glossed over some of the details (Score:2, Interesting)

        by 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.
        • Hey, everyone, This is Aaron from the iQuarium project. After reading the Wired article, I'd like to clear something up. The above poster is right, but there's more. The article didn't explicitly mention the most important aspect of the project, which is that our tank will actually display the fluid flow around the swimming fish as they swim. We'll use tiny particles that act like they're suspended in the water, and they will swirl into vortices behind the fish, so you can see how they are more efficient. The vortices a fish uses to swim are not created by its tailfin, they're caused by the sinusoidal motion of its body. Computing the fluid flow requires solving the Navier-Stokes equations, and THAT's what takes so much computation time. (We're getting help on that part from Qiang Zhu and Yuming Liu, two post-doctoral research engineers)

          Anyway, I've never seen a fish screensaver that displays the dynamic fluid velocity around the fish. Also, the fish will be able to react to the movement of people (or anything) in the hall, thanks to a ceiling mounted webcam and some simple computer vision. Finally, we're not planning on spending quite that much on a display if at all possible. We'd like to get a company to donate one in exchange for publicity. I guess that's all. If you've got any questions, post here and Katie, Audrey, or I will try to answer.

      • Umm... I don't suppose it ever occured to you that she was talking to a *reporter*??? The people who have trouble quoting politicians correctly, much less MIT graduate students who probably have genius-level IQ's?

        Some people find it helpful to talk on the level of the people they're conversing with -- "y'see this cable? well, the cable's got this little pointy part that needs to go up, see, and we stick it in *here* like *this*..." instead of "so you put the IDE cable in the HDD, remembering to observe orientation..."

    • Re:Bored? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by ergonal ( 609484 )
      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? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by slustbader ( 584904 )
        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.
    • 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".

      (Sorry if this is offtopic, i've seen it a lot lately).

      You used quote marks. Who were you quoting? Quote marks *mean* something. If you want to emphasise, use emphasis, *emphasis*, emphasis or _emphasis_. What you said made me think that the students didn't see any benefits other than the prettiness of a screensaver, when it was just you who couldn't see what they were actually doing.

    • If you can't see the diference between a commercial application of a technology and a scheme (yum, lambdas) to improve the atmosphere, demonstrate a colorful application of this research, and to attract attention so that the research is moved on to your definition of real applications, then perhaps the person who's using the computer for you should commit you? And on to the real reason for the reply- no, we do not have too much time on our hands. no we are not "bored," we just like to have cool applications of our work to distract us from that education we came here to get. You know, kind of like our suicide holidays? We do need an outlet for all that stress that we build up with those endless psets, break-neck lecture paces, and the experience of failing (at anything) for the first time in our life (ever). Don't try and trash things you don't understand.

  • And in few years: (Score:4, Funny)

    by Krapangor ( 533950 ) on Saturday March 08, 2003 @08:41AM (#5466531) Homepage
    Sony announces Flippo the first mechanical dolphin.
    Très useful.

  • months of computation (Score:5, Funny)

    by jo_ham ( 604554 ) <joham999@g m a i l . com> on Saturday March 08, 2003 @08:41AM (#5466532)
    It takes me months of compuutation just to work out my taxes, and there's nowt cool about that.

  • Sharks (Score:4, Funny)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Saturday March 08, 2003 @08:48AM (#5466547)
    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 (Score:5, Funny)

    by Harald Paulsen ( 621759 ) on Saturday March 08, 2003 @08:50AM (#5466552) Homepage
    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... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Saturday March 08, 2003 @08:53AM (#5466558) Journal
    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.
    • I see, so incredible ammounts of number-crunching power are going, not to research of anything important, but to making a large, 3D, screensaver

      Hey dad, get off the internet you're getting grumpy again.

      Come on, you have accidentally coined the meaning of Nerd. That's what everything most of us nerds think is cool.

      And I you read a bit further down you would have read this statement too :

      "A lot of people walking down that corridor already love computer engineering," she said. "We want to show them how they can apply those skills to fluid dynamics."

      I mean, it's cool, it seems a blast to do, it will require some real understanding of fluid dynamics, and might even spark some interrest for other fields of use for computer science. All you have to do is to get over the fact that they are using a Microsoft grant to do it.

      Murphy(c)

      • I mean, it's cool, it seems a blast to do [...] get over the fact that they are using a Microsoft grant to do it.

        No. The problem is that "cool" has it's place. It's safe to say that MIT is not the place to waste student's time and effort, as well as tax dollars on something that is cool. If it was done completly with private funds, I wouldn't have cared at all... However, I begin to care when Microsoft and MIT are getting primo advertising at the expense of their students, and tax dollars that should be going to some sort of technological advancement... NOT making a screen saver. It's almost like having Microsoft use prisioners as underpaid employees... Microsoft is then using government money for their own gain.

  • Now if only.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by doogieb ( 178045 ) <slashdot@NOspam.doogiebrodie.com> on Saturday March 08, 2003 @08:56AM (#5466565) Homepage
    .... they could do the maths to work out how to realistically show a toaster flying... ;>
  • 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

    The article answers your question:

    "But the net effect should be a more realistic movement of the fish than what you see in a screensaver, for example"

  • Cleaning? (Score:2, Funny)

    by sploxx ( 622853 )
    Would be interesting to know what the result of cleaning using magnetic aquarium cleaners is :)

    • Just what I was thinking. I guess the fish will soon be invisible because simulated algae and snails start clogging up the screens.

      And then the students can start programming to calculate the movements of the famous "belly-up" routine of the fish...

  • Sounds like El-Fish (Score:5, Informative)

    by SWroclawski ( 95770 ) <serge&wroclawski,org> on Saturday March 08, 2003 @09:11AM (#5466592) Homepage
    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/ [geocities.com]. 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 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Evil Adrian ( 253301 ) on Saturday March 08, 2003 @09:17AM (#5466601) Homepage
    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 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by karlm ( 158591 ) on Saturday March 08, 2003 @01:52PM (#5467619) Homepage
      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.

      • 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.
        BTW, the fishbowl doesn't exist anymore. It was replaced with the new "Student Services Center" in 1997. However, they did create another fishbowl cluster down the extension of the infinite corridor in building 16.
    • Generally we behave. Every prank I've ever seen or heard of here is.... generally non-destructive. Theft is almost non-existant. Ie. Most of our classrooms have the power point-type projectors and many have the flatscreen/touchscreen room controls. And they're left open so we can use them after hours for gaming, movie watching, etc.

  • False Advertising (Score:5, Funny)

    by spoonist ( 32012 ) on Saturday March 08, 2003 @09:21AM (#5466607) Journal
    ... 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... (Score:4, Informative)

    by madgeorge ( 632496 ) on Saturday March 08, 2003 @09:21AM (#5466608)
    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 [wired.com], a collaboration between makers of all things Sims, Maxis Software [ea.com], and Russian research group AnimaTek [digi-element.com]. It was an absolutely beautiful [geocities.com] 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

  • 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."

  • months of computation ? (Score:1, Funny)

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

    You must be an EMACS user.

  • This prooves once and for all.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ....that programmers are not web designers [mit.edu] :-)

    -$|{

  • Police, coming through! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 08, 2003 @09:28AM (#5466622)
    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 (Score:4, Funny)

    by odyrithm ( 461343 ) on Saturday March 08, 2003 @09:34AM (#5466633)
    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. ;)
  • Imagine a Beowulf school of these!

    *ducks*
  • 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?
  • 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.
  • Yeah, and just across the Charles at the Museum of Science they've had the same sort of system setup as an exhibit for some time now. There are even some fish that you can turn into killer fish .. they wander around the "tank" and eat the other fishies.
  • I still think that Alien Fish Exchange [alienfishexchange.com] represents a much superior virtual space for playing with fish than the MIT one! The graphics are much cuter too!
  • Yet another addition to "The Lurking Horror."
  • An engineering professor at UC Berkeley created a project [dailycal.org] 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.
  • See my favorite fishies here [dragonswest.com]. Thanks to evil landlord who won't let me have any pet larget than a dust mite, this is pretty much as good as it gets.

  • $16000 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 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.
  • Sega Dreamcast's wonderful canon of amazing products contains a virtual fish-tank called Seaman. Seaman is FAR SUPERIOR to this fish tank of which you speak...or so I assume. To digress, I can't wait for DCX which is SEGA's re-release of the dreamcast...then I'll be able to play all my discs again.

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