From
Physorg.com.
Since Sky in Google Earth debuted two weeks ago to let the public explore the heavens from their computers, two University of California, Berkeley, astronomers have jumped in to populate Google's sky with the most recently discovered heavenly objects.
This week, Google posted on its Web site another layer of information users can add to their personal sky: real-time updates on new objects that flash in the heavens.
"Right out of the gate, Google Sky has become a powerful tool for the public and in the classroom," said Bloom, an assistant professor of astronomy who employed Sky in his opening lecture last week to an introductory astronomy class at UC Berkeley. "And if it works well and gets more and more of these transient events into the system, we as researchers will be using it."
Bloom and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology and Los Alamos National Laboratory build the "cyber"-infrastructure, called VOEventNet, that allows satellites and telescopes to send astronomers, and Google, real-time information on these newly discovered transients in the sky. VOEvent is an important backbone for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which should detect thousands of interesting transients every night. The LSST is a proposed ground-based 8.4-meter telescope that will image faint astronomical objects across the entire sky. (Targeted for completion by 2017)
"LSST answers the question, How do you do 21st century astronomy?" Bloom said. "The cutting edge won't be people going to telescopes and taking data, but terabytes and terabytes of data coming in every day, and astronomers sifting though the data for new discoveries."
VOEventNet, which allows these disparate data to be fed to Sky, was developed with funding from the National Science Foundation as a way to automate astronomy so that new observations are relayed within seconds or minutes to robotic telescopes that can quickly and automatically swivel to observe them.
Bloom expects more astronomers to take advantage of the ease of adding mash-ups to Sky in Google Earth in order to layer interesting astronomical objects over the viewing area and create personalized tours of the cosmos.
Tags:
research,
real-time,
Astronomy,
cooperation,
Google,
education
Posted in
Science ,
World ,
Technology
Posted by skyleecm at
23:56 PM
From
Physorg.com.
It's an odd combination of Navier-Stokes equations and NASCAR driving. Computer scientists at the University of Washington have developed software that is incorporated in new technology allowing television audiences to instantaneously see how air flows around speeding cars.
The algorithm Model Reduction for Real-time Fluids, first presented at a SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference last August, was since used by ESPN and sporting-technology company Sportvision Inc. to create a new effect for racing coverage. The fast-paced innovation hit prime time in late July when ESPN used the Draft Track technology to visualize the air flow behind cars in the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard, a NASCAR race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
The Draft Track application calculates air flow over the cars and then displays it as colors trailing behind the car. Green, blue, yellow and red correspond to different speeds and directions for air flow when two or more cars approach one another while driving at speeds upward of 200 miles per hour.
"What ESPN wanted to do is tell the story for the viewer of how drafting works because it's such a big part of the event," said Rick Cavallaro, chief scientist at Sportvision. "How the drivers use drafting to save gas, pick up speed, et cetera."
Zoran Popović, an associate professor in the UW's department of computer science and engineering, and two students wrote the code that dramatically speeds up real-time fluid dynamics simulations. To make the simulation work in real time and be interactive, "you kind of need to rethink the math problem," he said. The new algorithm first simulates all the ways that smoke, fire -- or in this case, modified stock cars -- can behave. Then it runs the simulation for a reduced number of physically possible parameters.
Popović imagined that the first applications would be introducing interactive simulations in video games that would allow players to drive through a smoky fire, interact with the weather in a flight simulator, or drive racecars in a virtual wind tunnel. Other research results from his lab were licensed to the game industry and then adopted in video games.
Sportvision creates technology to enhance sports coverage. The company has already developed add-ons for ESPN's NASCAR coverage, placing Global Positioning System receivers, inertial measurement systems and telemetry on each car that can determine each car's speed and position several times a second. Now company engineers will use data from those sensors to model and display the air flowing over the cars.
Tags:
Math,
Game,
real-time,
fluid-dynamics,
simulation,
Car,
algorithm
Posted in
Car ,
Math ,
Game ,
Technology ,
Sports
Posted by skyleecm at
01:19 AM
anonymous
Subscribe to this blog. 
Powered by