Visualization

This International Space Fellowship article reports technicians in Orbiter Processing Facility-3, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, are preparing space shuttle Discovery for its transport to the Vehicle Assembly Building on Jan. 7.

From the article: "The vehicle will be jacked up and its wheels secured to enable the Orbiter Transport System, or OTS, to slide underneath it for the short trip.

Meanwhile, work to remove and replace the shuttle’s side hatch tiles is progressing and will continue though the holiday.

Discovery’s payload, the S6 truss segment and solar arrays are scheduled to be loaded into the transport canister Jan. 7 and transferred to the launch pad Jan. 11.

At NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, the STS-119 astronauts are in the Motion Base Simulator practicing launch procedures.

From this News Channel 10 article : "While there is not any snow in the immediate forecast, TxDOT is making sure the snow plow drivers are prepared for the next winter blast. This is the the first year TxDOT invested in virtual reality snow plow training.

Sixty six snow plow drivers from Amarillo and Childress sat behind the wheel of a virtual snow plow machine over the past week. It looks like something straight out a video game, but in reality, it's teaching the drivers how to handle the icy roads and dangerous conditions.

TxDOT says the biggest benefit to this new virtual training system is it's risk free.

This msnbc.com article reports testing subjects in a virtual building could lead to improved design. From the article: "Getting test subjects lost in a virtual building could reveal a lot about how to construct more people-friendly hospitals, schools and other spaces, according to a unique collaboration by a group of California neurologists and architects.

The merging of neuroscience, architecture, psychology and virtual reality is allowing researchers to track the brain signals of study participants as they navigate through a simulated building within a high-tech room called the StarCAVE.

From this ScienceDaily article : "You really can learn a lot from a dummy. For decades, automakers have been crashing test dummies to gain insight to how various auto safety systems protect — or fail to protect — people during car accidents. But those dummies are made of plastic and steel, not tissue and bone. They can teach only so much.

A new generation of dummies will tell a lot more. An international group of automakers and suppliers has formed a Global Human Body Models Consortium to fund the best minds to build a better dummy.

Two teams of engineers with U.Va.'s Center for Biomechanics will play major roles in the creation of this new "virtual" dummy, one that will live entirely within computers, but will be more realistic than any physical dummy ever subjected to a crash test.

From this California Institutes for Telecommunications and Information Technology news release : "San Diego, Sept. 17, 2008 -- Its name sounds like something out of science fiction, but the StarCAVE at the University of California, San Diego is now a science fact. The virtual-reality environment allows groups of scientists to venture into worlds as small as nanoparticles and as big as the cosmos - permitting new insights that could fuel discoveries in many fields. Early users of the StarCAVE include UC San Diego researchers in biomedicine, neuroscience, structural engineering, archaeology, earth science, genomics, art history and other disciplines.

This BBC News article talks about the Dynamic Respiratory Endoscope, an augmented reality system, which lets vets assess live pictures of a horse's airways as it gallops at full speed. From the article: "The pioneering equipment could replace traditional methods where a horse is examined while running on a treadmill.

The University of Glasgow's Equine Hospital acquired the endoscope as part of a joint venture with horse training firm, Mark Johnston Racing.

The instrument will be used in the university's newly-launched Performance Horse Clinic.

Dr Patrick Pollock, senior clinician in equine surgery, said: "Within the animal kingdom, horses are considered to be elite athletes because of their unique anatomy and physiology.

This innovations-report article takes a look at the "Virtual and Extended Reality for highest safety and reliability of Embedded Systems” (VIERforES) project by the Fraunhofer institutes for Experimental Software Engineering IESE and for Factory Operation and Automation IFF together with the University of Kaiserslautern and Otto-von-Guericke University in Magdeburg.

This NYtimes article takes a look at the WorldWide Telescope project: a software by Microsoft Research which permits to explore a virtual reproduction of the universe. From the article: "The skies may be the next frontier in travel, yet not even the wealthiest space tourist can zoom out to, say, the Crab Nebula, the Trapezium Cluster or Eta Carinae, a star 100 times more massive than the Sun and 7,500 light-years away.

This Mechdyne press release reports the Texas Learning & Computation Center (TLC2) contracted with Mechdyne Corporation to design and build a 34-seat visualization theatre with 8 Megapixel (MP) stereographic projection. From the press release: "The new theater provides all of the academic departments of the University of Houston, as well as partners from the community and industry, with the ability to collaboratively view and work with complex data and computer generated imagery.

From the OpenSceneGraph website: "PERTHSHIRE, Scotland - 25th April 2008 - OpenSceneGraph Professional Services announces the release of OpenSceneGraph 2.4, the industry's leading open-source scene graph technology, designed to accelerate application development and improve 3D graphics performance. OpenSceneGraph 2.4 written entirely in Standard C++ and built upon OpenGL, offers developers working in the visual simulation, game development, virtual reality, scientific visualization and modeling markets - a real-time visualization tool which eclipses commercial scene graph toolkits in functionality, stability and performance. OpenSceneGraph 2.4 runs on all Microsoft Windows platforms, Apple OS/X, GNU/Linux, IRIX, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and FreeBSD operating systems.