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Author Archives: mir
US Human Spaceflight – Getting to LEO with Proper Incentives
Off-Topic
I started out to write a very long article for this blog on US human spaceflight with the goal of getting it online near the time of the last shuttle flight. That didn’t happen and it was probably a bad idea as there’s just too much ground to cover. Since then, NASA has announced a new heavy lift rocket. I think this is a horribly bad idea and am willing to bet, right here, that it will be cancelled in four years, tops. OK, so lots of nay-saying. Does this mean I think US human spaceflight is or should be dead? Most definitely not. Indeed, this period after the shuttle could be used to radically change human spaceflight and dramatically increase the volume and ambition of spaceflight without increasing the budget. Even trimming the budget. Will it happen? Probably not.
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High Dynamic Range Imaging
Ashima Devices
We’ve been playing with high dynamic range imaging as part of our process of capturing building interiors for our 3D modeling (EDIT: an awesome intro to HDR for artistic photography was pointed out to me here). And we admit, we’ve been having some fun! Check out this local tone mapped image of our street corner (Lake and California, in Pasadena), taken from the roof at sunset. Click on the image link, below, to see the whole thing (about 8 Mb).
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Seven Years of Global Mars Images
Ashima Research
Ashima Research’s marsclimatecenter.com website just had a major update, with the addition of seven years of full colour, global images of Mars. The data were collected between 1999 and 2006 by the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC). The images were created by Huiqun Wang, our colleague at Harvard. The website allows you to select images by Earth date (day – month – year style) and Mars date (using areocentric solar longitude and Martian year). You can also select from northern and southern polar images, and traditional global map-style images. To read more about the images, check out the image data set description page. To get going browsing, selecting, and/or downloading the images, check out the image archive search tool.
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Ashima Arts’ Open Source Noise Used in WebGL Demo
Ashima Arts
Here’s a great example of our noise function used to power a beautiful piece of 3D art in WebGL. Click on the image to go check it out (with a WebGL-enabled browser, of course…)
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3D Reconstruction and WebGL Display
Ashima Arts, Ashima Devices
Ashima Devices’ first demo of its 3D reconstruction and display technology just went live on the web. With a WebGL-enabled browser – and a modern GPU and drivers – you can check out the demo at the Ashima Devices website. The demo provides an idea of how a customer finished product would look – in this case if partial building reconstruction were required.
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A place of our own…
Ashima Group
OK, so we’ve had the place for a little while, but there’s nothing like the sense of finally having your name on the door. Feels official somehow 
Well here it is: Ashima Group world headquarters, labeled for the first time!
Superrotation on Titan (or in our model, at least)…
Ashima Research
A decade-and-a-half long quandary for those interested in the dynamics of the Titan atmosphere seems to have been cleared up with our most recent model results. They suggest a very ‘quiet’ Titan atmosphere – very low levels of mixing – interspersed with much more vigorous, but short-lived storm events. Not only does this paint a picture of how Titan’s atmosphere might work, but suggest that spacecraft observations of Titan that seek to measure waves and eddies (storms) in Titan’s atmosphere can’t assume that a random sampling will properly characterize the atmosphere. This gets complex and will need some background to explain, so come on in and read the rest of this blog post…
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Noise about our Noise!
Ashima Arts
As part of our Ooman game tech demo release, we open-sourced some code including a new implementation of simplex noise. Noise is a key component of making procedural game assets: instead of loading in a texture for marble or clouds (or most materials), you can calculate these noisy aspects of nature on the fly, and at different resolutions.
For webGL (and for a few other applications), current implementations of noise are problematic because of resource demands. Our version of noise fixes these issues and has been gaining notice in the community. Check out this post from WebGL.org:
“Mar 17, 2011 – Since its inception, GLSL has sadly lacked native support for noise(). A few GLSL implementations of Perlin noise have been presented over the years, but now it seems like we have a winner. Ian McEwan of Ashima Arts has come up with a very clever version of “simplex noise” that requires neither texture access nor arrays. It is compatible with WebGL, it is a set of self-contained GLSL functions with no external dependencies, and it runs fast. A demo with full source code has been posted to the GLSL developer’s forum.”
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Ooman Game Tech Demo – ashimagames.com
Ashima Arts
We are releasing a “vertical slice” of our new game tech demo, Ooman. Ultimately, our goal is to make Ooman an immersive 3-D puzzle platformer in a “real” virtual environment. This means full use of three spatial dimensions with smooth camera interpolation from any angle. The demo highlights the 3D environment tech using WebGL including our camera model and character motion system.
The key thing here is: this is smooth, 3D game play native in a web browser!
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Mars Climate Center Online…
Ashima Research
We just brought online our new home for processed Mars atmosphere and climate data. This site was conceived of as a place to house our “reanalysis” data (see below) for the global Martian atmosphere using the NCAR DART system and funded by NASA AISRP. We’re also working on getting a comprehensive archive of processed global weather maps online from Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter with our colleague at Harvard, Huiqun Wang.
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