Page 32: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (October 1999)

UHMW Marine

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Circle 307 on Reader Service Card 32

H3I

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Circle 305 on Reader Service Card

Pound For Pound,

Ballast-Crete

Is Better.

For All Marine Fixed Ballast Operations

Densities Up To 400 pcf (S.G. 6.4)

Inorganic, removable, and available in a wide range of densities, Ballast-

Crete is the ballast of choice for naval architects and engineers around the world. For more information, call

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Redland

GENSTAE

Training as a towboat is advancing along the Parana or Paraguay

River. A control panel is present, and the simulation sequence changes, based on the decisions the mariner makes as he manipulates the controls and "pilots" the vessel. Types of data utilized go far beyond visual video footage and include the hydrodynamics of the vessel's configuration, the effect of river currents, the bathyme- try, or profile of underwater forces and objects as the boat passes, as well as many other information cate- gories. This technology now adds new capabilities and databases every month and is used both in training and planning for economic development.

Computer Visualization

Simulations that recreate the perceptual world of the human eye have always been some of the most complex ever created, frequently employing supercomputers, mainframes, and enormous numbers of PCs. One exam- ple is the Jet Propulsion Lab "flyby" which begins with streams of binary data from various space probes and ends with the world seen by the eye moving throughout the solar system, as though looking out the window of a moving space station. This particular computer graphics application has formed visions of the solar system more completely than any other.

Computer visualization is now the leading edge of all the sciences because it can translate the chemistry and physics of nature into the eye's "language" images.

Many databases are too complex to be understood as numbers; they can only be grasped as an image or as a sequence of animation.

An example would be a famous university study of galaxy formation that tried to answer whether the astro- nomical data we now possess, going back to microwave remnants of the Big Bang, favors a relatively even dis- tribution of matter in the universe or, alternatively, the characteristic "clumps" of matter found in galaxies. The answer was to assemble and "rerun," with computer visualization, the spectral data processed by astronomers.

The data for this experiment was so multitudinous it had to be processed using the computer facilities of two dozen different universities worldwide, each working on a part of the puzzle for months. When the whole puzzle was re-assembled, it was presented as a "fast forward" motion picture of the universe's evolution as it would appear to the eye in a few minutes. The clumps of mat- ter in galaxies were clearly the outcome.

The technology was first introduced in the flight sim- ulations of World War II, to be further refined in the marine and radar simulations of the 1970s that taught subjects to correctly perceive relative motion.

River navigation simulation is more complex than flight simulation because a plane is traveling much

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Simulation showing 3 towboat and barge safely transit- ing Esperanza Bridge. It is possible to see the sharp right turn necessary, and the problem that would be presented by the cargo length.