Randall A. Gordon

There have been many distributed computing projects around for years. Basically these projects work by sending out data to many computers to do calculations on in the computer’s spare time. It started with Distributed.net attempting to crack MD5 encryption with brute computing force. As Distributed gained popularity other projects started popping up en masse. The SETI@home project focuses on detecting interstellar communications from across the universe by sorting through massive amounts of radio telescope data. One project I personally participated in was the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, also known as GIMPS, searched for a specific type of prime number called a Mersenne prime (if you hadn’t already figured it out from the name of the project). There are several projects which attempt to solve the puzzles of protein folding. One of them is Rosetta@home.

But what do you get when you take the Rosetta engine and apply game theory to it? That would be a new type of distributed computing project called Fold It. As their tag line says, “Solve Puzzles for Science”, the game is a series of protein folding puzzles. The first puzzle can be seen at the right. The gist of the game involves reorganizing the amino acids and backbones of the proteins. You move them into configurations which are compact while requiring as little energy as possible to maintain such a configuration.

As the game progresses the puzzles become more difficult as the proteins which are presented become more complex. If there are people out there who simply can “see” how proteins work in their mind’s eye–protein savants–then this game could catapult protein research forward.

The Fold It site mentions that there will be a feature added over the summer that will allow for players to “design” proteins. Models which work in the Rosetta simulator can then be synthesized in the lab. This aspect of the project is most intriguing to me. It opens the door for anyone to have the chance at creating a protein which could be the key to curing AIDS, solving the world’s energy crisis or any number of issues.

If you would like the chance at helping with cracking one of the most important scientific problems biologists are currently tackling, have a look at Fold It. So far, I’m having a blast folding!

To paint your living room you have to remove all the furniture. Then you must lay down covers so the floor does not get paint on it. After that comes the masking of windows, door frames, etc. Now you are ready to get paint all over a set of clothing you don’t particularly care about. Then, hopefully, some of the paint gets on the walls. What if you could skip all of that and change the color and even the texture of your walls just by pressing a few buttons?

To pull off such a feat, augmented reality comes to the rescue! Augmented reality, or AR, is a blending of “true” reality and virtual reality. Generally AR systems use computers to track the motion of objects and use that data to overlay useful information into our field of vision–such as adding virtual objects to the real world. Most applications to date have involved camera setups which track 2D “barcodes” to achieve motion tracking.

A great example of this can be seen in the YouTube video I have embedded below. It shows a demo of such barcode tracking being used to turn everyday objects into fantastical imagery from Harry Potter. A baseball cap turns into the Sorting Hat, a stick turns into a sword, a piece of paper becomes The Marauder’s Map and a cardboard box holds a Golden Snitch.

One hurdle to putting augmented reality into general use is getting such functionality off a computer monitor and placed directly in front of our eyes. Head mounted displays with optics to overlay a screen onto the real world are the common solution. At this point in time, however, commercially available HMDs are bulky and generally in need of wired power sources. But that is changing quickly as more companies put R&D into augmented reality technologies.

So how does this relate to interior design and painting your living room walls? Take a look at the diagram below:

So here we have a gentleman who is ecstatic (if you could see his face, he’s got a huge grin) that he doesn’t have to get covered in paint in order to change the look of his wall. The funny looking symbols on the four corners of the wall are what an AR system would use to track the location of the wall. This would then be used to overlay whatever color, pattern or texture our happy ex-painter wishes. The next diagram shows that he settled on a Victorian wallpaper. Note that the tracking symbols would not be seen by the user of the system, I have simply left them visible as a reference point.

As I mentioned earlier, the easiest way of pulling this off with today’s technology is with a head mounted display. So a major limitation would be that only people who are wearing a HMD would be able to see the texture on the wall. In addition to the HMD, the motion tracking system would also need to be head mounted so the wall doesn’t require a camera to track the user’s head. But as technology proceeds forward, the limitations will disappear. People like Johnny Chung Lee are showing us how to use easily accessed devices like the Nintendo Wii remote to do high quality head tracking. Nanotechnology is driving the size of all technology smaller and smaller so that HMDs will turn into contact lens displays and allow batteries to supply the necessary power to make the systems mobile.

This morning I stopped by IGN.com for the first time in months and immediately encountered an interview with Harald Seeley of CryTek. While the interview is quite interesting, talking about licensing CryENGINE 2 and its future applications, the demo video that they are showing off is the bread and butter. The demo is a recreation of a Sony Bravia advert from 2005 which involved a couple hundred thousand “bouncy balls” that were rolled down a street in San Francisco. For the demo, the balls were replaced with the ever classic 3D model–the teapot!

This demo hits home for me, as I am a proponent of simulated reality technologies. The graphics hardware of tomorrow combined with advanced rendering software like CryENGINE 2 get us one step closer to simulated reality becoming…reality. The demo shows hundreds of thousands of (apparently rubber) teapots bouncing down a modeled street among many cars as bystanders watch wondering what the hell is going on. Take a peek and drool as you realize that video on par with Pixar movies is being rendered in real time.