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Backgammon
QUOTE
And No, It's Not for Seeing Through Clothes

Innovation: Augmented reality goggles. Available: Three to five years.
From: Issue 96 | July 2005 |  Page 32 By: Lucas Conley

X-ray vision: For centuries it has been the stuff of fantasy -- and fodder for gag mail-order ads in the back of Boys' Life. But now researchers at Siemens are developing a technology that approximates the effect of seeing through walls -- or, more to the point, bones.

While current medical-imaging techniques such as ultrasound, magnetic resonance (MR), and computer tomography (CT) harvest a wealth of data from inside our bodies, the resulting images can be viewed only on light boards and computer screens. To a neurosurgeon plunging a seven-inch needle into a patient's brain, that's clearly an imperfect solution: He has to take his eye off the incision to see where he's headed.

Siemens's response, called "augmented reality," starts with a headset that overlays prerecorded ultrasound, MR, or CT images with real-time video captured by a pair of cameras just above the physician's eyes. A third infrared camera, also mounted on the headset, spatially orients the video in relation to a set of optical tracking markers placed around the patient's body. The resulting picture is projected onto two tiny screens positioned directly in front of the physician's eyes. Presto! X-ray vision -- or the next best thing.

The headset allows doctors to simultaneously view the surface and what's beneath. That, says Siemens program manager Frank Sauer, should mean less-invasive procedures that are faster, more accurate, and require less medication. Such claims already have attracted the attention of neurosurgeons, interventional radiologists, and orthopedic surgeons, many of whom have signed up to test the device in clinical trials. Dr. Stuart Silverman, a radiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, hopes to apply the technology in procedures such as ablation, in which a large needle is guided into a tumor and heated, chilled, or used to inject liquid, ultimately killing unwanted cells. Augmented reality, he says, could "allow us to target structures even smaller than those we do now."

Siemens projects the price of the complete augmented reality system at about $400,000. The actual cost, though, could be closer to $100,000 for the many hospitals that already have conventional imaging technology in place. Sauer has no plans to advertise in Boys' Life.
Ancient History
Big deal. Go read about specs in Bruce Sterling's short story "Deep Eddy."
Birdy
Actually IRL "Augmented Reality" (AR) is much cheaper this days. The SiggiBoys are quite conservativ when it comes to price/power estimations.

http://www.se.rit.edu/~jrv/research/ar/

http://www.uni-weimar.de/~bimber/research.php (it's in that funny language called English)

The technology is quite advanced and depending on the qualite AR is doable since 2002 or so.


One of the main stops on the way to wider use of the stuff is(as often):

The MBA

It's not a "cool" technology to make a fast bug with but a lot of small marked specialist tools that simly don't fit to an Armani suit.
Birdy

"Slamming MBA's into walls since 1989"
SL James
Search is your friend.

Link
Kesh
As I keep saying, MIT has been working on augmented reality systems since at least the mid-80's (when I saw it on Scientific American Frontiers). It's coming.
Ellery
It keeps on coming, but it never seems to get here.
Penta
Like fusion power?
SL James
No. People have produced working AR.
Synner
QUOTE (Ellery @ Jul 14 2005, 02:17 AM)
It keeps on coming, but it never seems to get here.

Actually certain commercial applications are here (check the rest of their site and these guys are an ass-end-of-Europe Portuguese company!). The market just hasn't caught up in implementing them for various reasons.
Adarael
Ahh, Fast Eddie.

AH, not to suggest you weren't already okay in my book, you just went up a bunch of notches. I loved Eddie, despite his terrible taste in women.
Ancient History
Deep Eddie has a taste for the hardcore. Don't we all?
Grinder
Hardcore? Yep. wink.gif

Backgammon
QUOTE (SL James)
No. People have produced working AR.

People have produced funtionning fusion power also. Just not in a comercially viable kind of way.
SL James
Only in the "Blow up Nagasaki" kind of way.
littlesean
Unless I am mistaken, that was fission, not fusion.
SL James
You're mistaken. Hiroshima was fission.
littlesean
I don't mean to be contrary,but... I am going to be.

They were both fission. Fusion was only a theory at that point, and the first fusion bomb was not detonated until November of 1952, seven years later. The Nagasaki bomb used plutonium instead of uranium, but was still fission. Fusion takes small atoms and fuses them, fission takes large ones and splits them.
HERE is an explanation.
Backgammon
Fusion, the power source of our future, exists but is not quite ready yet. Which is not the same as "no one has produced fusion". They have, but no power plant uses it yet.
SL James
QUOTE (littlesean)
I don't mean to be contrary,but... I am going to be.

They were both fission. Fusion was only a theory at that point, and the first fusion bomb was not detonated until November of 1952, seven years later. The Nagasaki bomb used plutonium instead of uranium, but was still fission. Fusion takes small atoms and fuses them, fission takes large ones and splits them.
HERE is an explanation.

Oh fopr the love of fuck. Way to go Off-topic, but instead of using some unrelated article I was actually working on information about the bomb itself.

QUOTE
In order to start the chain reaction, the mass of plutonium must be fused together while a radioactive source emitted a neutron. The way the bomb was design was that a Beryllium/Polonium mixture, radioactive elements that release neutrons, would be placed in the center of a sphere. The sphere would be made up of equally spaced and shaped plutonium sections. The sphere looked a lot like a soccer ball. When the bomb was detonated, the sphere would implode, or collapse inward, causing all the plutonium to fuse together, reach supercritical mass, and start the chain reaction. The initial explosion, which caused the implosion, would be made by conventional explosive. All this would occur in a fraction of a second (about one ten-millionth). This bomb was also an altimeter bomb. Both bombs had many safety options to guarantee the success of the detonation as well as the safety of the delivery crew.
Ellery
It's still not fusion, however. Fusion refers to the act of fusing atomic nuclei together to create nuclei of larger mass. Energy is released when this occurs (a lot of energy!), and mass is lost. (Yay for E=mc^2.) This only works when the nuclei are smaller than iron nuclei; heavier nuclei actually give off energy when broken (e.g. 235U and plutonium--but also any old heavy element like gold, if you could find a way to break it up).

The first step in creating a *fission* bomb, where the nuclei are split up, is to pack the material densely enough so you get a chain reaction--one nucleus splits up, releases lots of energy and particles, which hit nearby nuclei (on average, more than one), which hit nearby nuclei, which...and off you go. One way to accomplish this is to take separate lumps of plutonium and use high explosives to smash it all together so it's dense enough for the chain reaction to take off (but doesn't just go off spontaneously). The usage of the term "fuse" in that article is unfortunate, but they just mean "bring pieces of plutonium next to each other, with explosives, because we're in a hurry".

In a fusion bomb, you use the same compression trick (often, in fact, using conventional explosives to trigger a fission reaction that then squeezes in on hydrogen at the center of the bomb), except to a much greater extent. Here you squeeze a light element (typically deuterium, a form of hydrogen with an extra neutron) together so hard that the nuclei fuse, releasing energy. This does tend to blow the other hydrogen away, so you need to compress everything very fast in order to get lots of reactions to occur before the explosion blows the warhead apart.

So, in summary: Nagisaki = plutonium bomb = fission.
Edward
I seem to recall an experimental fusion power plant was produced, and it did generate power, just not as much as it consumed.

Edward
Overwatch
Fusion is EASY! smile.gif

You can even do it yourself. Some deuterium, a vacuum pump and a few odds and ends. See?

The problem with fusion is that no one has made it effecient enough to actaully make it a viable power source. However, there is a new Fusion Reactor that is going to be built in France, and then a real one in Japan after that.

How did we get here from augmented reality again?
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