Well, maybe it IS only a lens. Not too long ago, Magic Leap were proclaiming they had more than just a lens, but a Photonic Chip. The Infromation thinks it was just more hype. Credit: Wired.
Magic Leap has been the most controversial company in the emerging market of new VR, AR and MR technologies. Super-secretive but boasting an influx of US $1.4 billion in capital from leading technical and entertainments companies – including Google – it has drawn a lot of attention, despite almost nothing of its technology being generally revealed.
Magic Leap promises a headset system which will be as easy to wear and remove as a pair of glass – but crucially, and despite several years of development work , has not revealed anything of what this headset might look like beyond various patent filings. In the meantime, the company has continued to release astonishing videos of their product’s apparent capabilities. Some of these were undeniably special effects enhanced pieces – but it now appears that this might be the case with more of the videos than the company were actually willing to let on.
In particular, on December 8th, the paywalled site The Informationpublished a report on Magic Leap indicating that at least one of the more recent videos – that of office workers playing a shoot-’em-up game which was stated as being filmed using Magic Leap’s own technology was actually enhanced by Magic Leap partner, Weta Workshop (Weta’s head, Sir Richard Taylor, was an early investor in the company, and his business partner, director Peter Jackson, is an advisor). This has led to questions being raised over just how genuine Magic Leap is, and how real their product might in fact be.
The Verge summarises the report from The Information, pointing to the less-than-honest video and making mention of Magic Leap’s massive test rig, called The Beast, and the fact that as yet, the company hasn’t moved beyond a tethered headset style device which is claimed to give an inferior result when compared to Microsoft’s HoloLens. This has prompted others to question whether Magic Leap is dead – or potentially could be DOA, given it appears to lag behind what might be somewhat comparable products such as the HoloLens.
Magic Leap haven’t been entirely secretive about the size of some of their test rigs. Credit: Peter Yang / Wired
As it is, the report from The Information stands sharply at odds with those from the likes of Wired, where Peter Yang from Wired spent time with Magic Leap back in April 2016, using that experience to tell The Untold Story of Magic Leap. Then, shortly ahead of The Information’s piece, and at the end of November, Forbes’ David Ewalt sat down with Magic Leap’s founder, Romy Abovitz. Like The Information’s Reed Albergotti, both Yang and Ewalt reference the fact that Magic leap utilises a headset rather than “glasses”, but that’s about all their articles have in common with Albergotti’s view. So where does that leave us?
First off, scepticism is healthy. There are many promises being made around VR / AR and MR, many of which could well be a mix of hype, hope and wishful endeavour. WE also have little ide just what reporters are being shown – and there is no denying Abovitz enjoys his role as unconventional showman.
Even so, it’s hard to see Magic Leap as purely being smoke and mirrors and flimflam; Abovitz has a track record of innovation and product delivery – he sold his medical robotic company for US $1.7 billion in 2009. Magic Leap has also made no secret of being in things for a long haul, developing a new paradigm in computing, while Albergotti acknowledges the company is now working towards a pair of glasses type of headset, albeit with different technology for their earlier work. Thus, writing them off entirely could be a premature.
A final point is that the company has never gone beyond saying a consumer product will be appearing “soonish”. Ewalt, writing for Forbes, estimates Magic Leap has perhaps another 18 months to go before a consumer launch. That’s a long time, given the HoloLens and Meta’s offerings will be out will before then. but the latter two are liable to have price tags of US $1,000 or more. If this is the case, are they really liable to corner the market, particularly if Magic Leap comes up with a product as user-friendly (and potentially superior) as Peter Yang at Wired feels will be the case – and at a lower price point, even if it is based on technology other than the hyped “Digital Lightfield™”?
The only thing we perhaps can say as a result of this is the hype trains – positive and negative – on what VR / AR / MR might or might not deliver will likely continue to rumble forward for a while yet.
A mosaic of Mastcam images captured by NASA’s Curiosity rover on November 10th, 2016 (Sol 1,516), showing the lower slopes of “Mount Sharp”. Variations in the rocks colour hint at the diversity of their composition. The purple tone of the foreground rocks has been seen in other rocks where hematite has been detected. Winds and windblown sand help to keep rocks relatively free of dust which would otherwise obscure their colour differentiation. These images have been white balanced, so the scene appears as it would under typical Earth daylight conditions. Credit: NASA/JPL / MSSS
For more than a year now, NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, has been slowly climbing the lower slopes of “Mount Sharp” – more formally called Aeolis Mons, the 5 kilometre (3 mi) high layered deposit extending off of the central peak of Gale Crater. Whilst still on the lower slopes of the mound, the rover has already found minerals absent from lower levels within the crater, and these, together with the ample evidence for water once having existed in the crater, further point to Mars perhaps having once been habitable.
Details of the latest findings from Curiosity were presented at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), which commenced on Monday, December 12th, in San Francisco. Making the presentation were members of the current MSL science team and its former principal investigator, John Grotzinger, – the Fletcher Jones Professor of Geology at Caltech.
Mineral veins are an important way to study the movements of water within a location, as they are result of cracks in layered rock being filled with chemicals that are dissolved in water. This alters the chemistry and composition of rock formations, providing vital clues on the prevailing conditions around the time they were deposited.
An illustration shown Gale Crater today, with the crater rim (l) and the central impact peak (r), against which “Mount Sharp” rises, which Curiosity climbing its lower slope (obviously not to scale). Credit: NASA/JPL
In the case of the slopes most recently examined by Curiosity, the science team have found that hematite, clay minerals and boron are more abundant than has been found in the lower, older layers. These point to a complex environment where groundwater interactions led to clay-bearing sediments and diverse minerals being deposited over time, effectively creating a “chemical reactor” which, although no actual evidence for Martian microbes having existed within the minerals has been found, still creates an environment which may have been beneficial life.
“There is so much variability in the composition at different elevations, we’ve hit a jackpot,” Grotzinger said during the presentation. “A sedimentary basin such as this is a chemical reactor. Elements get rearranged. New minerals form and old ones dissolve. Electrons get redistributed. On Earth, these reactions support life.”
As Gale Crater might have looked billions of years ago, showing how the circulation of groundwater led to chemical changes and mineral deposits. Credit: NASA/JPL
The increasing presence of hematite found by the rover as it continues up “Mount Sharp” suggests both warmer conditions and more interaction with the atmosphere at higher levels. In addition, the increasing concentrations of hematite, relative to magnetite at lower levels further suggests that iron oxidisation increased over time, creating the “chemical reactor” Grotzinger referenced: the loss of electrons through the oxidisation process can provide the energy necessary for life to sustain itself.
Another ingredient increasing in recent measurements by Curiosity is the element boron, which the rover’s laser-shooting Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument has been detecting within calcium sulphate mineral veins. Boron is famously associated with arid sites where much water has evaporated away. However, the amounts found so far are so minor, they make it much harder to determine the environmental implications of their presence.
Currently the team is considering at least two possibilities. In the first, the evaporation of the lake thought to have once existed within Gale Crater formed a boron-containing deposit in an overlying layer, not yet reached by Curiosity, then water later re-dissolved the boron and carried it down through a fracture network into the layers the rover is currently investigating, where it accumulated along with fracture-filling vein minerals. In the second, changes in the chemistry of clay-bearing deposits, such as evidenced by the increased hematite, affected how groundwater picked up and dropped off boron within the local sediments.
Curiosity’s 4-year, 10 kilometre (6.2 mi) Trek from its landing site (the blue star), through the Yellowknife Ridge area, key to early findings by the rover, then down along the foothills of “Mount Sharp” to the climb up the mound’s lower slopes. The blue triangles denote way-points on the route, where science work was carried out. The images of Gale Crater and “Mount Sharp” are composed of high-resolution images obtained by the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Credit: NASA/JPL / MSSS
An unusual shot of John Glenn as he examines a celestial training device in preparation for his Mercury-Atlas orbital launch in February 1962. Credit: NASA
On December 8th, 2016, John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth, passed away at the age of 95.
A U.S. Marine Corps pilot who served in both World War II and the Korean War, Glenn was actually the third American to fly into space after Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom, who both flew in 1961. However, for his 1962 flight, Glenn completed three orbits of the Earth aboard his Friendship 7 capsule before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean, becoming the third man to circle the Earth in space. His death means that all of the Mercury 7 – astronauts chosen to lead the fledging American space programme in 1959 – have now passed away.
Born in 1921 in Ohio, Glenn was commissioned in the US Marine Corps in 1943. After training, he served in the Pacific theatre of war, flying 59 fighter combat missions during World War II. In 1946, he returned to the far east, serving in Northern China and then Guam through until 1948, when he transferred to Texas as an instructor in advanced flight training. After further training, he served two tours of duty in the Korean War, flying a total of 149 combat missions. In 1954, he graduated from th U.S. Naval Test Pilot School, and in 1957 completed the first supersonic transcontinental flight, travelling from California to New York in 3 hours 23 minutes and 8.3 seconds.
Glenn preparing for his orbital flight, February, 1962. Credit: NASA
He became involved in the US space programme before he was selected as a part of NASA’s first astronaut intake. As a serving Marine Corps officer, he was part of NASA research on re-entry vehicle shapes and participated in the Mercury capsule design.
even so, his acceptance into the astronaut corps was not assured: he was almost turned down on the grounds of age – he was approaching 40, the upper age limit for candidates, and he lacked the required science-based degree at the time. However, he fought hard for selection, and was accepted into the Space Task Group in 1959, where, in addition to astronaut training, he was involved in helping with both the Mercury and early Apollo cockpit layout and control functions.
He quickly became the unofficial spokesperson for the Mercury 7, having an easy way with the press – but he wasn’t necessarily popular within the group, setting himself somewhat aside from the rest through study and hard work. This became apparent when the choice for the first man to fly into space came down to a vote among the Seven themselves. Glenn came in third behind Alan Shephard and Gus Grissom, both of whom did fly before him despite a lot of behind-the-scenes lobbying by Glenn himself to get assigned to the first sub-orbital flight. have himself put on the first flight.
However, all this passed into history on February 20th, 1962, when Glenn lifted off atop his Mercury-Atlas 6 rocket, flying his Friendship 7 capsule on a 5 hour, 3-orbit flight round the Earth. And I do mean “fly”: during the flight, he was supposed to briefly take control of the Mercury capsule and manually fly it for 30 minutes before handing control back to the flight systems. However a malfunction in the automatic control system during his first orbit mean he had to take over control of the vehicle for the two remaining orbits.
His problems were then further compounded by telemetry suggesting his capsule’s heat shield had come loose, forcing him to manually fly the vehicle and keep the disposal retro-rocket pack (normally jettisoned prior to re-entry into Earth’s denser atmosphere) in place in case the straps from it were the only things keeping his heat shield in position. At the time, the frictional heat caused the rocket pack to burn up, with large chunks of flaming debris from it passing his window, prompting him to think his vehicle was burning up. “Fortunately it was the rocket pack,” he later wryly told a reporter, “Or I wouldn’t be answering these questions!”
His successful splashdown in the Atlantic meant Glenn became the fifth man to fly in space, and the third to orbit the Earth, after Russians Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov. Any upset he may have felt at being passed over for the first Mercury flight was swept aside as Glenn found himself fêted by the press and politicians alike; he later called the flight the “greatest day of his life”.
Glenn, left, became close friends with John F. Kennedy (centre) and Robert Kennedy,entering US politics in 1964 at Robert Kennedy’s prompting. In this photograph, Glenn and Kennedy are seen with the second man to orbit the Earth, Russian cosmonaut Gherman Titov, who circled the Earth 17 times in August 1961, and who to this day remains the youngest person to fly in space at the time of his flight; he was just 26 years old. Credit: NASA / Asif A. Siddiqi
In 1964, Glenn retired from NASA, still a commissioned officer in the US Marine Corps (from which he retired in 1965 with the rank of colonel). His interest turned to politics, having been solidly befriended by John and Robert the Kennedy – that latter of whom persuaded him to run for office. After two unsuccessful attempts, he was elected to the US Senate representing his home state of Ohio in 1974, and remained so through until 1999. In 1984 he sought nomination as the Democratic Party’s candidate for the US Presidential election that year, losing out to Walter Mondale – who in turn lost to Republican Ronald Reagan in the election.
In 1998, shortly before retiring from the Senate, Glenn returned to orbit aboard the space shuttle Discovery during mission STS-95. He was 77 at the time, making him the oldest person to fly in space – a record he still holds.
The Mercury 7 – NASA’s first astronauts. Standing (l-r): Alan B. Shephard Jr. (1st US astronaut to fly in space); Walter B. Schirra Jr; John Glenn (first US astronaut to orbit the Earth). Seated (l-r): Virgil I Grissom (2nd US astronaut in space); M. Scott Carpenter; Donald Slayton and L. Gordon Cooper Jr. Credit: NASA
Image courtesy of the OpenSimulator Community Conference
The 2016 OpenSimulator Community Conference is in progress over the weekend of December 10th / 11th. An annual event, the conference focuses on the developer and user community creating the OpenSimulator software. It is organised as a joint production by Core Developers of OpenSimuator and AvaCon, and this year is sponsored by University of California, Irvine, Institute for Virtual Environments and Computer Games, Rockcliffe University Consortium, and Virtual Outworlding together with a host crowdfunders.
The conference this year once again features business presentations, talks, panel discussions, workshops, social events and hypergrid activities, covering a wide range of subject areas, including education, social VR, using virtual worlds and environments for historical recreations – and much more besides.
You can find the full schedule of events on the OpenSimulator Community Conference website, together with instructions on how to log-in and join and of the sessions. The latter are also being streamed for those unable to attend via avatar.
Image courtesy of the OpenSimulator Community Conference
The NASA Eagleworks EmDrive prototype. Credit: NASA Eagleworks / NASA Spaceflight Forum
The radio frequency (RF) resonant cavity thruster, or EmDrive (pronounced “M-drive”) as it is more popularly known, has been a source of much controversy since the idea first came into the public eye around 16 years ago, and the debate has been heating up again over the last few months.
First proposed by British engineer Roger Shawyer in 1999, the EmDrive is supposed to be the world’s first working reactionless drive, a means of generating thrust without the use of any propellant. Over the years, it has undergone investigation and testing by a number of organisations and agencies before being quietly pushed aside, while some critics have been publicly scathing of the whole idea, labelling it the “impossible drive” as it violates the fundamental law of conservation of momentum (summed up in Newton’s third law, “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”). Even so, research and testing has continued.
The EmDrive supposedly generates thrust by reflecting microwaves between opposite walls of a cone-shaped cavity. In principle, no microwaves or anything else leaves the device, and so it is considered reactionless – although Shawyer states that it isn’t, because the propulsive force is created by a “reaction between the end plates of the waveguide and the Electromagnetic wave propagated within it.”
The attraction of the drive is that were it to work, it could provide an almost endless supply of thrust for satellites and other spacecraft, opening the door to flights to Mars in just 70 days as opposed to the 180-234 days currently required using conventional means. The problem is no-one has actually got the idea to work. Researchers at the at the Northwestern Polytechnical University (NWPU) in Xi’an, China, thought they had in 2012, but further testing in 2014 revealed the thrust apparently created by their EmDrive test rig was actually due to a faulty power connector causing false readings.
Now, however, it seems that a test rig operated by NASA’s Eagleworks Laboratory might actually have demonstrated that in principle an EmDrive could work. News on the testing has actually been leaking out of the laboratory for the past 2-3 months – and has rightfully been met with a healthy dose of scepticism. However, a paper from the team carrying out the research was submitted for peer-review through the Journal of Propulsion and Power, a publication maintained by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) – and is said to have passed muster.
NASA’s Johnson Space Centre, Texas, the home of the Eagleworks Laboratory. Credit: NASA / James Blair
So, does this mean the EmDrive works? Well – no. The peer-review process means that no discernible flaws have been found in the methodology and testing carried out by the Eagleworks team, meriting the idea worthy of further investigation and research. It doesn’t mean fault or error may not yet be found going forward.
One major means of testing the theory of the EmDrive would be to build a working unit and place it in space and see if it works. This is precisely what US engineer Guido Fetta hopes to do. He is planning to place a small version of his Q-Drive (derived from the EmDrive) in orbit for 6 months aboard a CubeSat (between 10×20×30 cm and 12×24×36 cm in size), and then try over six months to manoeuvre the CubeSat using the drive. He’s not alone; China similarly plans an on-orbit test of an EmDrive prototype, although no dates have been specified for them mission.
Did Spirit Find Signature of Past Martian Life?
NASA’s MER rover, Spirit (MER-A) and Opportunity (MER-B) arrived on Mars in January 2004, and Opportunity continues to explore the planet today. Credit: NASA / JPL
In January 2004, NASA landed two solar-powered rovers, Spirit and Opportunity on Mars. There primary mission was scheduled to last just 90 days – but Opportunity is still operating today, almost 13 years after it arrived on Mars. Sadly, Spirit was not so lucky; in May 2009, it became stuck in a “sand trap” and unable to free itself, eventually losing power as its solar panels could not be oriented towards the winter Sun on Mars, and falling silent in May 2010.
Nevertheless, Spirit gathered a huge amount of data and images, some of which is being re-examined by scientists Steven Ruff and Jack Farmer from Arizona State University as a result of their field expeditions to Chile – and they believe the rover may have come across evidence for past Martian life.
While examining images of a plateau of layered rocks dubbed “Home Plate”, examined by Spirit in 2006, Ruff and Farmer noticed the ground was covered in multiple nodular masses of opaline silica with digitate structures strikingly similar to structures they have encountered within active hot spring/geyser discharge channels at a site in northern Chile called El Tatio.
This is a region which, due a rare combination of high elevation, low precipitation rate, coupled with a high ultraviolet irradiance, is regarded as a potential analogue for past conditions on Mars. What’s more, as a volcanic are, it shares much in common with “Home Plate”, which is believed to be an explosive volcanic deposit created when hot basalt rock came into contact with liquid water. Part of the formation may actually be an extinct Martian fumarole.
An image of “Home Plate” showing a mass of opaline silica nodules, captured by NASA’s Spirit rover in 2006, and a photograph showing similar formations at El Tatio, Chile Credit: ASU/Ruff & Farmer
The opaline silica Ruff and Farmer found at El Tatio have been shown to be largely of biotic origin; that is, created by microbes. Could this be the same for those Spirit saw at “Home Plate” in 2006? Ruff and Farmer believe it might.
“Although fully abiotic (physical rather than biological) processes are not ruled out for the Martian silica structures, they satisfy an a priori definition of potential biosignatures,” the researchers state in a paper on their work. A biosignature is defined by NASA as “an object, substance and/or pattern that might have a biological origin and thus compels investigators to gather more data before reaching a conclusion as to the presence or absence of life.”
A closer view of the structures as images by Spirit in 2006, and a an image of the opaline silica at El Tatio taken at the same distance and resolution. Credit: ASU/Ruff & Farmer
Ruff and Farmer note that while they cannot prove nor disprove a biological origin for the structures imaged by Spirit at “Home Plate”, they should be regarded as a potential biosignature by NASA’s own definition of the term. They go on to state that the only way to be sure would be for a robust examination to be made of the “Home Plate” location, perhaps by NASA’s upcoming Mars 2020, were it to be sent to that region, or through the examination of another region of Mars which is identified as being geographically and geologically similar.
Virgin SpaceShipTwo Flies
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo vehicle, VSS Unity completed its first free flight test on Saturday, December 3rd, after a month’s delay due to a combination of high winds and an unspecified technical issue, which combined to leave the vehicle able to make just a single captive / carry flight with its carry / launch aircraft, WhiteKightTwo.
VSS Unity seen from a chase plane as it glides towards touch-down on Saturday, December 3rd, 2016. Credit: Virgin Galactic
The unpowered flight, took place over the Mojave Air and Space Port in California and was the first in a series of around 10 – the precise number will depend on how well the targets for each flight are met – such tests the vehicle will make before Virgin Galactic move to powered flight tests using their new rocket motor for the vehicle, which has so far only been tested on the ground.
“It’s a happy day to be here,” Virgin Galactic’s founder, Sir Richard Branson said just before WhiteKnightTwo lifted SpaceShipTwo aloft. “We’ve got an exciting year ahead, and this is just the start of it.”
VSS Unity comes to rest on the runway after a successful first flight test. Credit: Virgin Galactic
As TGO Flexes Its Muscles, More Ice Found on Mars
ESA’s Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), which arrived in orbit around Mars in October, has yet to reach its primary science orbit but it is already flexing its muscles.
On November 22nd, as TGO swept over Mars on one of its current 4.2 day elliptical orbits, a test was carried out on its ability to relay data from the Martian surface to Earth, acting as a go-between for both the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers. As well as carrying a suite of science instruments and camera systems, TGO also carries a communications relay package from NASA called Electra, which allows the spacecraft to successful receive and store communications from NASA’s surface vehicles and then relay them to Earth.
Currently, TGO’s orbit carries it from just 300km (200 mi) above the surface of Mars all the way out to 98,000 km (60,000 mi), limiting its effectiveness as a communications relay. However, this will be lowered and circularised in the coming months to just 400 km (250 mi) above the planet, at which point TGO will be perfectly positioned to carry out its primary science mission and act as a relay for current and future surface missions, including Europe’s own ExoMars rover.
The relay test came at a time when ESA were working on calibrating TGO’s instruments during the close flights over Mars in each of it current orbits around the planet. These calibration tests included initial use of the orbiter’s “eyes”, the Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System (CaSSIS), which yielded, in the mission team’s words, “spectacular” results.
CaSSIS is an impressive system, capable of capturing still images and video across a number of colour wavelengths, and in 3D if required. All of CaSSIS’s capabilities were exercised during the test as the orbiter passed over Hebes Chasma, an eight km (5 mi) deep trough just to the north of the mighty Valles Marineris. The images collected during the pass have a resolution of 2.8 metres per pixel. To put that in perspective, it’s the equivalent of flying over New York city at 15,000 km/h (9,375 mph) and simultaneously getting sharp pictures of cars in Philadelphia.
The stereo capabilities of CaSSIS will allow scientists to build topographical 3D images of the surface on Mars, such as this test model, built from images of the Noctis Labyrinthus at the north-eastern end of the Vallis Mariners. Credit: ESA / Roscosmos / CaSSIS / UniBE
Once TGO reaches its operational orbit towards the end of 2017, CaSSIS will be capable of acquiring 12-20 high-resolution stereo and colour images of selected targets per day.
Meanwhile, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (TGO) has located another gigantic water ice deposit lying just under the Martian surface. The ice, lying beneath the planet’s Utopia Planitia, was located using MRO’s ground-penetrating Shallow Radar (SHARAD) instrument.
Utopia Planitia: home of a massive water ice deposit the size of New Mexico, and sitting just below the surface of Mars – click for full size. Credit: NASA
Estimated to be bigger than the US state of New Mexico and containing more water than Lake Superior, it is the second massive ice deposit SHARAD has found in just over a year. The first exists as a deposition averaging 40 metres (604 ft) think, extending almost all the way from the planet’s mid latitudes up to north polar region and covers an area the size of Texas and California combined.
The ice under Utopia Planitia – the landing site for NASA’s Viking 2 mission of the 1970s – is between 80 to 170 metres (260 feet to 560 ft) in thickness, comprises around 85% water ice (the rest being dirt and other deposits), and – most crucially – lies between 1 and 10 metres (3 and 30 ft) beneath the surface, potentially making it an accessible resource for future human missions to Mars.
NASA Considering Foreshortening Orion Crewed Flight
NASA is considering a shorter mission for the first crewed flight of its Orion Multi-Purpose Crewed Vehicle.
Originally, the flight was to have comprised a “slow cruise” out to the Moon of between 3 and 6 days, followed by three days in lunar orbit before making a similar 3-6 day “slow cruise” back to Earth. However, under the new plans being considered, Orion and its crew would be placed in a high Earth orbit (HEO) with an apogee of 35,000km (21,875 mi), where it would remain for a day, before separating from the Exploration Upper Stage (EUS) of its Space Launch System rocket and suing its Service Module motor to enter a trans-lunar injection orbit, for a single free-return flight around the Moon without ever going into orbit there.
Orion’s first mission may now only comprise a flight around the Moon, rather than orbiting it. Credit: Cosmic Pearl
“We’ve effectively designed this mission to be commensurate with the amount of risk we’re taking with crew on the vehicle for the first time,” Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations said when announcing the new plan. “We’ve tailored the mission to be appropriate with the risk we’re willing to take.”
Two particular risks worried mission planners: a failure with the Orion’s life support system in what would be its first space-based test with a crew aboard, or a failure with the Service Module’s engine which might leave them stranded in Lunar orbit. The redesigned mission means the life support system can be tested whilst in HEO, and the service module motor only needs to be fired once, when boosting Orion towards the Moon.
The revised Exploration Mission 2 flight plan (click to enlarge). Credit: NASA
The change in approach does not affect the Exploration Mission 1 flight, scheduled for 2018. That mission is expected to last around 25 days, with an uncrewed Orion vehicle placed in lunar orbit for several days before it returns to Earth. However, it does open the door to a more gradual approach to extending Orion’s capabilities, with NASA now planning one Exploration Mission a year being flown between 2023 and 2030.
Most of these flights will be cislunar operations, with EM-6 (2026) earmarked as the asteroid rendezvous mission originally scheduled to take place in 2023 as EM-3, but which has been pushed back as a result of delays in the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), its necessary precursor. EM-10 would mark the likely transition from cislunar missions to BEO (“Beyond Earth Orbit”) missions directed towards Mars, utilising Orion and expanded capabilities such as habitat modules and possible nuclear-powered propulsion units.
Oculus Touch: shipping December 6th, price: US $199.00
It’s been a while since I’ve covered anything in the VR and AR markets, so here’s a very quick catch-up on the main products I have been following on-and-off in these pages, and about which I’d been meaning to write about during October / November.
Oculus Rift: Touch and AWS
In October 2016, Oculus Rift opened the doors to pre-orders of the Touch, their hand controller system, due to start shipping on December 6th, 2016. The Touch price point is US $199.00 (approx. £189 / €187 / AU $265), which includes of Toybox, the multiplayer sandbox application designed specifically to show-off the controllers, and five Touch-ready game tiles.
Alongside of the Touch, Oculus announced additional Rift sensors would also be shipping on December 6th, 2016, at a price of US $79 (approx. £62.55 / €74.18 / AU $106.47), offering similar room-sized scanning capability as the HTC Vive. A new earbud system, designed to replace the earphones on the headset for a more immersive sound experience, was also made available for pre-order (again shipping on December 6th, at a cost of $49 (approx. £38.81 / €46 / AU $66).
Oculus Rift
As a rough-and-ready price comparison. The HTC Vive, which includes a headset with front-mounted “see-through” camera, two controllers and two room sensors for tracking) is prices at about US $800. The Oculus Rift (which ships with one sensor) + touch + and additional sensor comes to roughly US $877, with some recommendingtwo additional sensors offer optimal scanning bringing that total to US $956. Obviously, the latter package also includes a hefty amount of additional software, including Toybox.
On November 10th 2016, Oculus VR confirmed they were lowering the minimum specification for hardware needed to run an Oculus VR experience comfortably, as a result of something called Asynchronous Spacewarp, or AWS. The announcement came with a long and involved description of what AWS is, which the press announcement summarised down to a TL;DR summary:
Oculus is releasing a new technology aimed at reducing system hardware requirements while maintaining content quality across a wider array of hardware. Asynchronous Spacewarp (ASW) is a frame-rate smoothing technique that almost halves the CPU/GPU time required to produce nearly the same output from the same content. Like Asynchronous Timewarp (ATW), ASW is automatic and enabled without any additional effort from developers.
In other words, and to summarise the summary, AWS allows VR experiences remain fluid to the eye by “making up” the “in-between” animation frames, reducing the demand of continued, heavy processing on the part of the CPU / GPU.
On the left, a game with every frame directly rendered at 45fps by the GPU. On the right, the same game using software AWS to render some of the “in-between” animation frames, where the direction of the fox’s motion is “known”. Credit: TechRadar
This is turn means that “lower end” systems can now in theory run VR experiences which incorporate AWS. Although it has to be said that “lower end” must be approached with something of a caveat: it reduces the GPU requirement from a minimum of a NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD Radeon R9 290 and Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater to a NVIDIA GTX 960 / AMD Radeon RX 470 or greater and Intel i3-6100 / AMD FX4350 or greater – which some might consider a small move of the needle.
Finally, Oculus VR is working on an untethered version of the Rift headset, currently called Santa Cruz. It appeared in prototype form in October 2016, and includes a built-in processing system mounted with the headset, removing the need for it to be connected to a PC. Initial reports from those able to try the prototype were mixed, with several reporters noting their evaluations were carefully controlled, and that Oculus engineers were evasive when asked about the actual processing power and performance of the headset.
HTC Vive
On November 11th, 2016, HTC announced pre-orders were open for a “tether-less” kit for the Vive headset, produced by TPCAST, a Vive X Accelerator invested company. The kit comprises a wireless relay unit and battery pack to power the headset, bot of which attach to the headset harness, removing the need to connect it to a PC via USB cables. In difference to claims that wireless is “unsuitable” for VR due to factors such as latency, TPCAST is said to have no “noticeable difference” when using it with a Vive headset when compared to using the headset tethered directly to a PC.
The TPCAST wireless kit mounted on a HTC Vive. Credit: HTC / TPCast
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 