Think about the coolest cars you've seen in movies, commercials, and video games. Classics muscle cars to the impossible ones like Batmobiles. Now how do that get on screen? For a long time they have had to find or build one, and when the cars are bound to be destroyed (making for a great action scene) the costs adds up in a hurry. To avoid that we know that more and more movie makers have been digitally created the car scenes with CGI but even then, sometimes it just doesn't look quite right. Sometimes its moving wrong, others there are no reflections off the body of the car. So how do we fix the problem? Special Effects company The Mill decided they wanted to have a car that could be anything you wanted it to be. The Blackbird can be programmed to physically act as a different car, and then use its onboard sensors and special effects software to make sure the CGI version of itself looks just as real as the driving at a fraction of the cost. We can't all be Mark Watney - the botanist and mechanical engineer character from The Martian and his heroic efforts to survive on Mars for a the better part of a year. However the University of Hawaii at Manoa, funded by NASA, has run a series of experiments the comes pretty close. Earlier this week they finished a year long simulation of living on Mars with a crew of six scientists. Living in a dome with about 1000 square feet of space (a bit smaller than our own classroom) with its single window, the crew members had to cooperate well together to succeed in the task. Not only did they live off freeze dried foods and lacking some of the daily luxuries we've become used to (like running water), any communication with those outside the dome was delayed by at least 20 minutes and any problems that arose needed to be solved with the materials available - no running out to the hardware store for them. One of the real surprises was needing to rework their own plumping system. This and similar experiments and helping set the path for an eventual real mission to Mars, but it certainly didn't stop the crew from looking for some pizza and bananas upon their return to Earth |
Mr. WelkerTechnology Teacher at Southeast Raleigh High School. Archives
October 2019
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