simulations
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Google's quantum computing division will help develop new drugs
Google’s Quantum AI division is teaming with pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim to develop new types of pharmaceutical products.
DARPA taps golden age computers to solve tough simulations
If you thought modern computers were fast enough to solve any problem, nope! While certainly powerful, modern supercomputers aren't always great at complex fluid and plasma dynamic simulations, and DARPA, the outfit that does science for the US defense department, wants to fix that. To do so, it's invoking to the age of analog computers, "which solve equations by manipulating continuously changing values instead of discrete measurements." As an example, it cited the Norden bombsight, which calculated bomb trajectories using analog methods. That said, it's not planning on going back to vacuum tubes and rotating capacitors.
iRacing is the real driving simulator
I've never been to northern California's legendary Laguna Seca road course. In meatspace, at any rate. But thanks to dozens of realistic racing game recreations, I know the track's serpentine layout and its infamous corkscrew corner like the back of my hand. I've barreled through it hundreds if not thousands of times since 1999's Gran Turismo 2, so it darn well ought to be familiar by now, right? And it was, right up until I loaded onto iRacing's version of it.
Gaijin records real tank, artillery sounds for War Thunder's ground game
You may have heard about War Thunder's ongoing ground combat additions to its primary flight sim experience. What you probably haven't heard -- or seen -- is the Gaijin devs recording various real-world tank and artillery sounds that add to the game's authenticity. A new video released on the firm's YouTube channel says that over a dozen tanks were recorded "including 40 Stug, Panzer 3 and 4, Sherman M4A3, M4A1, and others." Click past the cut to see the crew and all the heavy artillery hard at work. And don't forget to check out the War Thunder website to see the newly released tank trees! [Thanks hilaryminc!]
Sandia Labs' MegaDroid project simulates 300,000 Android phones to fight wireless catastrophes (video)
We've seen some large-scale simulations, including some that couldn't get larger. Simulated cellular networks are still a rare breed, however, which makes Sandia National Laboratories' MegaDroid project all the more important. The project's cluster of off-the-shelf PCs emulates a town of 300,000 Android phones down to their cellular and GPS behavior, all with the aim of tracing the wider effects of natural disasters, hacking attempts and even simple software bugs. Researchers imagine the eventually public tool set being useful not just for app developers, but for the military and mesh network developers -- the kind who'd need to know how their on-the-field networks are running even when local authorities try to shut them down. MegaDroid is still very much an in-progress effort, although Sandia Labs isn't limiting its scope to Android and can see its work as relevant to iOS or any other platform where a ripple in the network can lead to a tidal wave of problems.
Scientists create simulation of the universe, reenact 14 billion years in a few months (video)
Are animations of Curiosity's Mars landing not enough to feed your space exploration appetite? Try this on for size: a group of scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies have generated what's billed as a full-fledged simulation of the universe. Arepo, the software behind the sim, took the observed afterglow of the big bang as its only input and sped things up by 14 billion years. The result was a model of the cosmos peppered with realistically depicted galaxies that look like our own and those around us. Previous programs created unseemly blobs of stars instead of the spiral galaxies that were hoped for because they divided space into cubes of fixed size and shape. Arepo's secret to producing accurate visualizations is its geometry; a grid that moves and flexes to mirror the motions of dark energy, dark matter, gasses and stars. Video playback of the celestial recreation clocks in at just over a minute, but it took Harvard's 1,024-core Odyssey super computer months to churn out. Next on the group's docket is tackling larger portions of the universe at a higher resolution. Head past the jump for the video and full press release, or hit the source links below for the nitty-gritty details in the team's trio of scholarly papers.
Robot arm takes engineers for a virtual reality Formula 1 ride (video)
As it turns out, industrial-strength robot arms are good for more than amusing hijinks and the occasional assembly line -- a team of researchers at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics have turned a KUKA KR 500 into the ultimate Formula 1 simulator ride. Outfitting the six-axis, half-ton lifter with a force-feedback steering wheel, pedals, video projector and curved screen, the newly-christened CyberMotion Simulator lets scientists throw a virtual Ferrari F2007 race car into the turns, while the cockpit whips around with up to 2 Gs of equal-and-opposite Newtonian force. There's actually no loftier goal for this particular science project, as the entire point was to create a racing video game that feels just like the real thing -- though to be fair, a second paper tested to see whether projectors or head-mounted displays made for better drivers. (Projectors won.) See how close they came to reality in a video after the break, while we go perform a little experiment of our own. [Thanks, Eric]
Adobe Captivate joins Mac family
Along with the release of the CS5 suite, Adobe is delivering a new product to the Mac platform; Captivate 5 is shipping next month, both in a standalone version and as the anchor of the new eLearning Suite 2 bundle alongside Flash, Dreamweaver, Photoshop Extended, Soundbooth and Acrobat. Captivate lets educators, trainers and documentation experts create tutorials and simulations that can be deployed to websites or learning management (LMS) infrastructure. Captivate has had a long run as a Windows app, so the interface was completely refreshed for the Mac release. New features in v5 include full roundtrip support with other components of the suite, so you can edit sound clips in Soundbooth or animations in Flash and return to where you left off in the Captivate project. The new version also allows for better video synchronization within a project. The PowerPoint plugin piece of the eLearning suite (Adobe Presenter) remains Win-only. You can learn more about Captivate via Adobe's prerecorded and upcoming live webcasts about the eLearning suite (Adobe account required). New licenses for the suite start at US$1799, with upgrades starting at $599. Captivate alone sells for $799 and can be upgraded starting at $299; cross-grades from the PC version to the Mac version should be allowed. Preorders are active now, and the suite is expected to ship in mid-June. Thanks Rich! [h/t The Mac Observer]
Miyamoto hints that Miis may be on the move
In an interview with LevelUp, Nintendo's Miyamoto hints that we might be seeing the Miis marching out of their parades and into virtual worlds similar to The Sims. Since Miyamoto didn't reveal much at GDC this year (in part due to shareholder regulations), they grilled him about his speech, and about Sony's PlayStation Home announcement. While Miyamoto claims not to have seen the video of Sony's goods (which is hard to believe, you think he'd be studying up on the competition) he does go on to say, "I wouldn't be surprised if we also did something along those lines further in the future ... in terms of taking the Miis and expanding them, that virtual kind of Sim-type experience. It's something that a lot of people have already done and shown interest in, and we have a lot of people internally who are interested in that type of a project too." We'd be interested too, as long as it doesn't feel like Nintendo is trying to copy anyone else's effort. Bring on something that allows us to take our Miis out of the house using the DS. Maybe you can teach them new skillz in some kind of game, and then bring them back home, or take them to visit someone else. Then they teach that person something new, and they teach two people, and they teach two people and then the world is taken over by Miis. Check out the full article for the details, as well as Miyamoto's description of bizarre-sounding game called Love and Berry.
Serious Games Summit: A military takeover of serious games
Things have come a long way since the U.S. Armed Forces got into the video game business with Marine Doom in the early '90s. Just ask Roger Smith, an analyst who presented on the past, present and future of military involvement in games at the Serious Games Summit. In the dozen or so years since their shallow, graphical Doom II mod, Smith said the military has integrated full-fledged training simulations for all sorts of different positions and situations. Right now most of that training goes to the "trigger pullers" -- the people risking their lives on the front lines -- but Smith said lower-cost technology solutions would allow for simulations geared towards medical, logistical, maintenance, and other troops who currently don't have many other training options.While recent military sims like America's Army and Full Spectrum Warrior have crossed over into the commercial market, Smith said he sees this trend slowing in the future, with the military developing narrowly targeted simulations suited specifically for military use, not living room use. As this trend continues, Smith sees the military developing internal game development resources to create its games, rather than buying off-the-shelf parts and talent from outside game companies.Smith also talked excitedly about the military's interest in developing for the Xbox 360 through the XNA program. While there were too many roadblocks to developing military trainers for the original Xbox, Smith said a simulation designed for powerful, affordable hardware like the 360 had the potential to open up training to every soldier, rather than just those in units with access to expensive, high-end PCs.Also see: Serious Games Summit: Defense dept. games
Inside the game: La Fuga
"I just fought my way up a wind tunnel, scrambled through a ventilation duct, clambered across 40 yards of rope netting, rolled under a fence, and burrowed through a mass of grapefruit-sized plastic spheres. Now I'm facing two doors. One leads to freedom. The other to a room with something nasty in it, possibly involving torture."The author of this piece isn't playing a console or PC game--he's playing Negoné's La Fuga ('The Escape') for real. Based in Madrid, the game combines an obstacle course, puzzles and interactive storytelling to break the fourth wall, creating a real-world game that realises many video game concepts.It sounds exciting and inventive; if Spain is too far away, then the game will be coming to Manhattan next year. However, immersive gaming may prove too specialised--sometimes we like to be in the comfort of our own living rooms, knowing that ingame bruises are only temporary, with the ability to pause it all and have a cup of tea when we feel like it.[Via /.]
