THE CUTTING EDGE: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Bringing Virtual Reality to the Grunts
One of the biggest boosters of virtual-reality technology has been the armed services. But while the military uses VR in flight and tank training, the average foot soldier still drills with field maneuvers.
Now even combat training may be going high-tech.
Dive Laboratories Inc. of Santa Cruz has developed a system for the Army that immerses soldiers in a virtual battle, complete with the sights and sounds of real warfare.
The soldiers, equipped with head-mounted displays and dummy rifles, are placed in triangular rooms where they can shoot at virtual enemies, run across virtual fields and watch virtual buildings being destroyed.
Virtual war doesn’t come cheap, however. The computer hardware includes a custom-built computer with a graphics-generating server, a 128-voice multichannel surround-sound system, voice recognition, wireless-tracking, head-mounted displays and props such as rifles. The cost? About $350,000.
Dive expects to demonstrate a working system this fall and have a fully operational system by spring.
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Fungus Among Us: When office workers suffer headaches, itchy eyes, rashes and respiratory problems, the cause is often air quality problems known collectively as Sick Building Syndrome.
Emissions from particleboard partitions, paints, carpets and cleaning supplies have long been blamed for creating sick buildings. But researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Indoor Environment Research Program cite another possible cause. They say molds and fungi growing inside buildings may be a significant source of airborne volatile organic compounds that affect air quality.
As molds and fungi grow, they give off metabolic gases that contain VOC emissions. In laboratory tests, the compounds produced by cultured fungi were identical to those from solvent-based building materials and cleaning supplies.
What can be done to eliminate this contamination?
Molds and fungi thrive on the dirt and dust trapped within ventilation systems. Researchers say cleaning and replacing cheap filters with more efficient ones that filter out both the microbes and the dirt they feed on could help get a sick building off the critical list.
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Cells Under Glass: Organ transplants have proven a great boon to people suffering from liver or kidney failure and certain kinds of blindness. But what about people such as diabetics, whose problems cannot be cured with an organ transplant?
Edward Pope is working on it. His tiny Westlake Village company, Matech Advanced Materials, is developing a class of materials called “living ceramics,” in which live cells, such as the pancreatic cells a diabetic needs to generate insulin, are encapsulated into silica gel and inserted under the skin. The cells then take over the duties of the diabetic’s inadequate pancreas.
The secret to Pope’s artificial implants is a form of glass called sol-gel. Unlike ordinary glass, which is made at very high temperatures, sol-gel is a highly pure type of glass that is made at room temperature.
This means that living tissue cells can survive being mixed in with the sol-gel before it hardens. The porous glass coating protects the cells from antibodies, which might destroy the foreign invaders, while allowing the encapsulated cells to secrete insulin. The implants could last for about a year before dissolving.
Pope’s living ceramics have been tested only on diabetic mice so far. But the technology also holds promise for pharmaceuticals manufacturing and bioremediation, in which microorganisms are used to make toxic chemicals harmless.
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Green Waste: Urban landfills take thousands of tons of lawn and tree clippings and leaves every year. But this same green waste, when spread over a San Joaquin Valley peach and nectarine research plot, produced a lower incidence of a deadly stone fruit disease than an adjoining plot that was treated with traditional composts and fertilizers.
UC Davis plant pathologist Themis Michailides isn’t sure why the clippings work, but he has a theory.
The answer, says Michailides, may lie in a harmless yeast that seems to protect fruit from brown rot. Either the green-waste compost carries the yeast into the orchard, or it provides a more favorable environment in which the yeast can thrive.
