Pushing Tin Remotely: The Start Of Flight Control In The Cloud

September 4, 2018 by Al Williams 59 Comments

In a 1999 movie (Pushing Tin), a flight controller is a passenger on a plane and tells the flight attendant that he needs to speak to the person controlling the plane. The flight attendant tells him the pilot is very busy to which the controller responds, “…you really think the pilot is controlling this plane? That would really scare me.” We wonder what that fictional character would think flying into Loveland Colorado. Their Colorado Remote Tower Project. While there’s still a human flight controller, they aren’t physically located at the airport and rely on remote cameras and radar so the controller can be located elsewhere.

The subject airport is the Northern Colorado Regional Airport and is the state’s busiest airport that has no tower. While the concept — generically known as Remote and Virtual Tower or RVT — dates back to 2002, its adoption is only now starting to pick up steam. An airport in Sweden was the first to go live for normal use in April of 2015, but the Colorado installation is the first approved in the United States. If the official site is a little too dry for you, there’s a CBS report with a video that gives you a quick overview of what’s happening. Or dive in with the demonstration video you can see below.

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Two Bit Circus Took The Tech We Love And Built An Amusement Park

August 24, 2018 by Roger Cheng 5 Comments

Carnival games are simple to pick up, designed to provide a little bit of entertainment in exchange for your game ticket. Given that the main point is just to have some silly fun with your friends, most game vendors have little reason to innovate. But we are people who play with microcontrollers and gratuitous LEDs. We look at these games and imagine bringing them into the 21st century. Well, there’s good news: the people of Two Bit Circus have been working along these lines, and they’re getting ready to invite the whole world to come and play with them.

“Interactive Entertainment” is how Two Bit Circus describe what they do, by employing the kinds of technology that frequent pages of Hackaday. But while we love hacks for their own sake here, Two Bit Circus applies them to amuse and engage everyone regardless of their technical knowledge. For the past few years they’ve been building on behalf of others for events like trade shows and private parties. Then they worked to put together their own event, a STEAM Carnival to spread love of technology, art, and fun. The problem? They are only temporary and for a limited audience, hence the desire for a permanent facility open to the public. Your Hackaday scribe had the opportunity to take a peek as they were putting on the finishing touches.

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Underwater VR Offers Zero Gravity On A Budget

August 12, 2018 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

Someday Elon Musk might manage to pack enough of us lowly serfs into one of his super rockets that we can actually afford a ticket to space, but until then our options for experiencing weightlessness are pretty limited. Even if you’ll settle for a ride on one of the so-called “Vomit Comet” reduced-gravity planes, you’ll have to surrender a decent chunk of change, and as the name implies, potentially your lunch as well. Is there no recourse for the hacker that wants to get a taste of the astronaut experience without a NASA-sized budget?

Well, if you’re willing to get wet, [spiritplumber] might have the answer for you. Using a few 3D printed components he’s designed, it’s possible to use Google Cardboard compatible virtual reality software from the comfort of your own pool. With Cardboard providing the visuals and the water keeping you buoyant, the end result is something not entirely unlike weightlessly flying around virtual environments.

To construct his underwater VR headset, [spiritplumber] uses a number of off-the-shelf products. The main “Cardboard” headset itself is the common plastic style that you can probably find in the clearance section of whatever Big Box retailer is convenient for you, and the waterproof bag that holds the phone can be obtained cheaply online. You’ll also need a pair of swimmers goggles to keep water from rudely interrupting your wide-eyed wonderment. As for the custom printed parts, a frame keeps the waterproof bag from pressing against the screen while submerged, and a large spacer is required to get the phone at the appropriate distance from the operator’s eyes.

To put his creation to the test, [spiritplumber] loads up a VR rendition of NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, where astronauts experience a near-weightless environment underwater. All that’s left to complete the experience is a DIY scuba regulator so you can stay submerged. Though at that point we wouldn’t be surprised if a passerby confuses your DIY space simulator for an elaborate suicide attempt.

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A Mobile Computer To Make William Gibson Jealous

July 28, 2018 by Tom Nardi 21 Comments

The personal computers in science fiction books, movies, and games are way cooler than the dinky pieces of hardware we’re stuck with in the real world. Granted the modern laptop has a bit more style than the beige boxes of yesteryear, but they still aren’t half as l33t as the custom PowerBooks in Hackers. Luckily for those who dream of jacking into the Matrix, the average hacker now has access to the technology required to make a custom computer to whatever fanciful specifications they wish.

A perfect example is this “cyberdeck” created by [Tinfoil_Haberdashery]. Inspired by William Gibson’s Neuromancer, this wild-looking machine is more than just a cosplay prop or conversation piece. It packs in enough power to be a daily-driver computer, as well as some special features which make it well suited for field work.

The body of the cyberdeck is 3D printed, but as [Tinfoil_Haberdashery] doesn’t have a 3D printer big enough to do the whole thing in one piece he had to break it up into subsections. He added a dovetail pattern to the edges of each piece, which makes for much stronger joint than simply gluing it together. A worthwhile tip if you ever find yourself in need of printing something really big.

Raspberry Pi aficionados might be disappointed to see the Intel NUC motherboard inside; which features a 3.4 Ghz dual-core CPU, 8 GB of RAM, and a roomy 500 GB SSD in an incredibly small package. To keep everything running the machine can take up to twelve 18650 cells, giving it a maximum run-time of sixteen hours or so. There’s even a 12 V power jack so he can power a soldering iron and other low voltage gadgets off of the deck’s batteries in a pinch. The integrated charger can take anywhere from 6 to 30 V, which gives [Tinfoil_Haberdashery] the ability to charge up from a wide array of sources.

But perhaps the best feature of the cyberdeck is the display. It uses a Fat Shark Transformer, a five inch 720p display designed for FPV drone use, which can not only fold flat against the deck for storage, but can be removed and slipped into a pair of goggles. This gives the cyberdeck a head mounted display that looks like something straight out of the movies. It even supports 3D, if you’re willing to cut the resolution in half.

Things have come a long way in the world of DIY head mounted computer displays. Really makes you wonder what the dedicated hacker is going to be able to pull off in another 10 years or so.

[via /r/cyberpunk]

N64 Emulated In VR Makes Hyrule Go 3D

July 10, 2018 by Donald Papp 17 Comments

The Nintendo 64 had some groundbreaking and popular 3D games, and [Avaer Kazmer] felt it was only right to tamper with things just enough to trick an emulator into playing Ocarina of Time in VR, complete with stereoscopic 3D. The result is more than just running an emulator on a simulated screen in virtual reality; the software correctly renders a slightly different perspective of the world of Hyrule to each eye in order to really make the 3D pop in a way the original never could, and make it playable with VR controllers in the process. The VR emulator solution is called Emukit and works best with Exokit, a JavaScript web browser for AR and VR environments for which [Avaer] is a developer.

It turns out that there were a few challenges to work around and a few new problems to solve, not least of which was mapping VR controllers to control an N64 game in a sensible way. One thing that wasn’t avoidable is that the N64’s rendered world may now pop in 3D, but it still springs forth from a rectangular stage. The N64, after all, is still only rendering a world in a TV-screen-sized portion; anything outside that rectangular window doesn’t really exist, and there’s no way around it as long an emulated N64 is running the show. Still, the result is impressive, and a video demo is embedded below where you can see the effect for yourself.

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360 Live VR Teleportation Uses Drones, Neural Networks, And Perseverance

May 30, 2018 by Lauren Faris 6 Comments

This past semester I added research to my already full schedule of math and engineering classes, as any masochistic student eagerly would. Packed schedule aside, how do you pass up the chance to work on implementing 360° virtual teleportation to anywhere in the world, in real-time. Yes, it is indeed the same concept as the cult worshipped Star Trek transporter, minus the ability to physically be at the location. Perhaps we can add a, “beam me up, Scotty” command when shutting down.

The research lab I was working with is the Laboratory for Immersive CommunicatiON (LION). It’s funded by NSF, Microsoft, and Adobe and has been on the pursuit of VR teleportation for some time now. There’s a lot of cool technologies at work here, like drones which are used as location collection devices. A network of drones will survey landscape anywhere in the world and build the collection assets needed for recreating it in VR. Okay, so a swarm of drones might seem a little intimidating at first, but when has emerging technology not?

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Redirected Walking In VR Done Via Exploit Of Eyeballs

April 11, 2018 by Donald Papp 55 Comments

[Anjul Patney] and [Qi Sun] demonstrated a fascinating new technique at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) for tricking a human into thinking a VR space is larger than it actually is. The way it works is this: when a person walks around in VR, they invariably make turns. During these turns, it’s possible to fool the person into thinking they have pivoted more or less than they have actually physically turned. With a way to manipulate perception of turns comes a way for software to gently manipulate a person’s perception of how large a virtual space is. Unlike other methods that rely on visual distortions, this method is undetectable by the viewer.

The software essentially exploits a quirk of how our eyes work. When a human’s eyes move around to look at different things, the eyeballs don’t physically glide smoothly from point to point. The eyes make frequent but unpredictable darting movements called saccades. There are a number of deeply interesting things about saccades, but the important one here is the fact that our eyes essentially go offline during saccadic movement. Our vision is perceived as a smooth and unbroken stream, but that’s a result of the brain stitching visual information into a cohesive whole, and filling in blanks without us being aware of it.

Part one of [Anjul] and [Qi]’s method is to manipulate perception of a virtual area relative to actual physical area by making a person’s pivots not a 1:1 match. In VR, it may appear one has turned more or less than one has in the real world, and in this way the software can guide the physical motion while making it appear in VR as though nothing is amiss. But by itself, this isn’t enough. To make the mismatches imperceptible, the system watches the eye for saccades and times its adjustments to occur only while they are underway. The brain ignores what happens during saccadic movement, stitches together the rest, and there you have it: a method to gently steer a human being in a way that a virtual space is larger than the physical area available.

Embedded below is a video demonstration and overview, which mentions other methods of manipulating perception of space in VR and how it avoids the pitfalls of other methods.

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