P3D 3D at Cray

[Bob Clark <rcc@xxxxxxxx>]

I just thought I'd share a 3D experience I had at work
yesterday.  I have worked for Cray Research for a number of
years as a software developer.  Cray makes "supercomputers"
used often by industries to simulate real-world events
in a virtual environment (for example car companies use
them to test car designs by simulating crashes so they can
learn a lot about their designs before actually building
and crashing real cars).

I finally got a tour of our applications lab and was able
to see a number of applications developed for some of
our customers.  The 2D applications were very impressive,
but not as amazing as the 3D demonstrations displayed on
a huge 4x5 foot screen using LCD glasses.

Here is what I saw in 3D on the big screen:

Demo 1: Sharks
    The display showed about 20 sharks and a whale
    randomly swimming around.  They had the stereo window
    within arms reach so you could reach out and touch
    the swimmers.  This was just a fun demonstration,
    so the graphics were not polished, but the effect was
    very nice.

Demo 2: Industrial mixing tank
    This was a model of a large mixing tank with two
    impellers.  The demonstration loop took about a minute
    to run and displayed the result of pouring a new
    liquid (graphically displayed as 9000 colored dots)
    into the tank.  You could watch as the new liquid
    was pushed by the impellers, bounced off the baffels
    on the wall of the tank and circled around again.
    An engineer could change the point of view , the
    speed of the impeller, the location of the new liquid
    introduction, the location of baffles, etc.

    The application developer told us of some companies
    that could pay for a large computer with the savings
    from a 1% increase in efficiency of their large mixing
    processes.

Demo 3: Oil well steam injection
    This was an underground model of an actual oilfield
    over a period of 10 years.  It showed the oil flowing
    up the wells and the effect that steam injection wells
    had on the oil flow.  You could watch the injection
    and the rivers of oil flowing over time.

Demo 4: US fly-over
    The model here was a fairly bad 3D map of the
    United States.  The cool part was that you wore
    special goggles and a special hand pointing device
    with several buttons.  The entire model would tilt
    according to your head position.  You could "fly"
    up and down and left and right by tipping the hand
    pointer accordingly.  The pointer had a zoom in and
    out button.  For example, after a little practice I
    was able to start way out in space, fly down and in
    towards Florida, level off near the ground, then fly
    up the coast to Maine.  The hand pointer also had a
    nifty menu button which put a 3D, slanting menu up on
    the screen along with what looked like a laser beam
    emmitting from the hand pointer right through the menu.

Neat stuff!
--
Bob Clark


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