We Choose the Moon - What a Wonderful Way to Relive History

Reposted from my personal Home Page.

When Apollo 11 launched its lunar module to make the first landing on the moon back in 1969, I had just had a newlywed tiff with my husband and had stalked outside to cool off. We were visiting his grandparents and his grandmother called to me and urged me to come back inside to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. Being young and hot-headed I stubbornly refused. I have regretted it ever since.

Now, today, 40 years after that historic touchdown, I got to relive the moment thanks to a wonderful website called "We Choose the Moon" that virtually recreated the experience. A new friend I met on the web just a couple of weeks ago happened to send me the link and I checked it out earlier but was several days away from the actual landing. Today, I'd been in town all day running errands and had just sat down and picked up the paper and saw a short blurb on the front page about how 40 years ago today at 1:17 p.m. PDT, the lunar module had landed on the moon. I asked my husband (yes, the same one!) what time it was and it was 1:15 p.m. so I raced back into my office, navigated to the website and downloaded the graphics just in time to see the lunar module kick up the dust of the moon's surface and descend to Tranquility Base. How thrilling!! At last - I feel I really witnessed it live!

The website designers had live streaming audio of the simulated broadcast from mission control and it made it feel so real! I loved how the virtual landing was timed to coincide with the actual event at the same real time pace. Looking forward to the virtual event just as I had the real event truly heightened my anticipation. What a wonderful way to relive history!

This website is chuck full of videos, photos, and audio clips from the actual experience as well as offering widgets to track the mission on your computer, etc. As I have only marginal DSL service at 1.5 mbps, I had problems with the volume of data transfer that has to occur between the website and my workstation and kept losing my connection. But at least I saw the actual landing and listened to about 15 minutes of post-landing transmissions before I started experiencing data overload. I would love to have the opportunity to relive other historical events in this way. Can you imagine how exciting it would be to witness one of Julius Caesar's triumphs or the crowning of Thutmosis III recreated at a date corresponding to the same date in history and paced in real time?

Sharing creativity key to innovation

I found this article about Mr. Lee's spectacular creativity using the Wiimote extremely interesting. What impressed me most was his willingness to share his ideas. I hope his current employer (Microsoft) does not rein in this enthusiasm.

"IN December, Johnny Chung Lee, then a Ph.D. candidate, posted a five-minute video on YouTube that became an Internet sensation.

To share his innovation, Johnny Chung Lee posted a video on YouTube. In it, he uses a Wii remote controller and “head tracking” glasses to make a screen image come alive.

The video showed how, in a few easy steps, the Nintendo Wii remote controller — or “Wiimote” — could transform a normal video screen into a virtual reality display, with graphics that seemed to pop through the screen and into the living room. So far, the video has been seen more than six million times.

Contrast this with what might have followed from other options Mr. Lee considered for communicating his ideas. He might have published a paper that only a few dozen specialists would have read. A talk at a conference would have brought a slightly larger audience. In either case, it would have taken months for his ideas to reach others.

Small wonder, then, that he maintains that posting to YouTube has been an essential part of his success as an inventor. “Sharing an idea the right way is just as important as doing the work itself,” he says. “If you create something but nobody knows, it’s as if it never happened.” - More

Although I have much more affinity for software applications than hardware applications, I couldn't help but admire the Wiimote VR project and hope Nintendo (or Microsoft) moves forward with its development. Some years ago at Comdex I evaluated several different VR headsets and most of them depended on manipulating the color spectrum in a way similar to the classic 3D glasses of the 50s did. Mr. Lee's approach is quite revolutionary. I wonder if the wearer experiences headaches or nausea like the old-style approach?

I also visited Mr. Lee's Wiimote Project discussion forum and watched a fascinating video about a guitarist using a Wiimote strapped to a guitar to create an instrument that uses the player's movement to modulate the frequency of the notes generated when the strings are plucked. If amateurs are coming up with these kinds of applications, I wonder what the pros at Nintendo have in store for all of us?

Augmented Reality Project Sounds like a perfect learning activity for Second Life

I’ve been cleaning off my desk in preparation for the move later this month and I came across an article on the Augmented Reality Project that MIT and Harvard are developing. It sounds like a perfect fit for educational activities in Second Life.

“With funding from a U.S. Department of Education Star Schools Program grant, researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the Teacher Education Program at MIT have developed an "augmented reality" game designed to teach math and science literacy skills to middle school students.

The game is played on a Dell Axim handheld computer and uses Global Positioning System (GPS) technology to correlate the students' real world location to their virtual location in the game's digital world. As the students move around a physical location, such as their school playground or sports fields, a map on their handheld displays digital objects and virtual people who exist in an augmented reality world superimposed on real space. This capability parallels the new means of information gathering, communication, and expression made possible by emerging interactive media (such as Web-enabled, GPS equipped cell phones with text messaging, video, and camera features).”

http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=harp

Although its being developed for high school students, it holds real potential for teaching such college-level subjects as environmental studies, architecture, and anthropology..