Many thanks to reader Jeremy Reiman, for sending us the link to this TED talk… truly a cool piece of work. I’ll let you watch the video first.
K… That was just awesome was it not. One important thing is that they are compiling a ridiculous amount of data to create that visualization. There was a lot of talk in the comments of that video about simulations versus visualization, and it is important to clarify that. Simulations are just make believe, they can be based on hypothesis yes, but there is no data behind it. Simulations can be computer rendered using the same technology as visualizations, but they are two different beasts. Visualizations can be prepared in many ways but are always based on actual data points. So in this case his camera can capture just ridiculous data points, and then they chug it through a potent computer to create these visualizations of the data.
It would be interesting to see how long of computer chugging time was required to produce the visualization, but one could postulate that with faster computers the processing time would of course diminish. How fast of a computer would we need to be able to record a video and then immediately begin playback? So things like this video, Lytro (https://www.lytro.com/) - which supposedly allows you to change your point of view after the picture was taken (by storing more information about the light as it hit the lens and re computing the image if you change position)… stinking amazying - are available in their infancy now.
In our story Jane has some pretty potent computing power in her matrix, and she is computing a battle field awareness that is based off of satellite’s the soldiers helmet cameras, microphones, sensors, and the images from the aerial observer drones… Is it that much of a stretch that she would be able to give them almost a real time battle field visualization? Or that she could then slow down and analyze the data for trajectories, patterns etc. You’ll see a lot more of this, and we will cover it again later in a science article, but we wanted to give a shout out to our reader.
Thanks for the contribution Jeremy, and thanks for reading!