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Out of this world proposal for solar wind power
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TECHNOLOGY
Gamers may gain from Nokia’s 3D rival to Google Street View CELLPHONE maker Nokia and its mapping division Navteq are developing a rival to Google’s Street View – one that promises full three-dimensional virtual models of cities that could be used as backdrops to computer games. Street View is a collection of 2D panoramic photos snapped on many of the world’s streets. Nokia’s version, by contrast, will offer full 3D rendering of buildings based on a street-level version of laser “radar”, or lidar. “That’s a big difference,” says Ville-Veikko Mattila at the Nokia Research Center in Tampere, Finland. The 3D models will be built with a lidar data set called Journey View, to be collected by a fleet of iTeach NS 17910 aw:Layout
Navteq street-imaging cars – dubbed “Truecars” – that will hit Europe’s streets in November. Software that accurately pins panoramic photographs onto these models will then decorate the 3D cityscape. Users will be able to move smoothly through the 3D models almost as if they were in a photorealistic driving game, says Mattila. Navigating through Google Street View, by contrast, means hopping between 2D panoramas a few metres apart. Google’s car fleet also gathered lidar data as it swept through our streets, although the search giant declined to comment when asked if it,20/9/10 too, plans to10:45 use its data to 1 1 Page
www.iteach.ac.uk
The appliance of Science is nothing without YOU! It’s not easy to train for a new career when you have financial commitments and other responsibilities. iTeach is an easily accessible online course where you can train to teach MATHS, CHEMISTRY or PHYSICS.
Bursaries of £13,800 are available for eligible students.
Recruiting NOW Apply online to start in January www.iteach.ac.uk
26 | NewScientist | 25 September 2010
–Street View boo-hoo?–
construct 3D urban models. The Street View cars famously raised privacy concerns in many countries – time will tell whether Truecars face a similar fate. A 3D version of Street View will be just the beginning for the Journey View data set, predicts Tony King-Smith of graphics
chip designer Imagination Technologies, based in Kings Langley, UK. “Navteq’s 3D technology will help drive some next-generation apps that look like being fun and engaging,” he says. Mattila showcased a version of his system at Nokia World in London last week. Paul Marks n
Trap the solar wind and our energy worries are over FORGET conventional solar power – the world’s energy needs could be met 100 billion times over using a satellite to harness the solar wind and beam the energy back to Earth. Focussing the beam could be tricky, though. The Dyson-Harrop satellite, as the new design is called, orbits the sun far from Earth. On board a long copper wire generates a magnetic field that snags the electrons in the solar wind. The electrons are funnelled into a receiver to produce a current, which generates the wire’s magnetic field to make the system self-sustaining. Any current not needed for the magnetic field powers an infrared laser, which beams energy back to Earth. A satellite with a 1-kilometre-long copper wire, sitting the same distance from the sun as the Earth, could generate 1 billion billion gigawatts of power, “100 billion times the power humanity currently requires”, says Brooks Harrop of Washington State University in Pullman who designed the satellite (International Journal
of Astrobiology, vol 9, p 88). However, to draw significant amounts of power, a Dyson-Harrop satellite needs a constant solar wind that’s only found high above the ecliptic – the plane defined by the Earth’s orbit around the sun. That means the satellite must sit so far from Earth that the laser beam would spread to cover thousands of square
“A Dyson-Harrop satellite could generate 100 billion times the power humanity currently needs” kilometres by the time it reached us. A sharp beam “would require stupendously huge optics”, says John Mankins of Artemis Innovation in Santa Maria, California. He also points out that the wire could burn out due to the huge current coursing through it. But he does say that a smaller version of this “clever and interesting” satellite could help power some space missions. Charles Choi n
TECHNOLOGY
Gamers may gain from Nokia’s 3D rival to Google Street View CELLPHONE maker Nokia and its mapping division Navteq are developing a rival to Google’s Street View – one that promises full three-dimensional virtual models of cities that could be used as backdrops to computer games. Street View is a collection of 2D panoramic photos snapped on many of the world’s streets. Nokia’s version, by contrast, will offer full 3D rendering of buildings based on a street-level version of laser “radar”, or lidar. “That’s a big difference,” says Ville-Veikko Mattila at the Nokia Research Center in Tampere, Finland. The 3D models will be built with a lidar data set called Journey View, to be collected by a fleet of iTeach NS 17910 aw:Layout
Navteq street-imaging cars – dubbed “Truecars” – that will hit Europe’s streets in November. Software that accurately pins panoramic photographs onto these models will then decorate the 3D cityscape. Users will be able to move smoothly through the 3D models almost as if they were in a photorealistic driving game, says Mattila. Navigating through Google Street View, by contrast, means hopping between 2D panoramas a few metres apart. Google’s car fleet also gathered lidar data as it swept through our streets, although the search giant declined to comment when asked if it,20/9/10 too, plans to10:45 use its data to 1 1 Page
www.iteach.ac.uk
The appliance of Science is nothing without YOU! It’s not easy to train for a new career when you have financial commitments and other responsibilities. iTeach is an easily accessible online course where you can train to teach MATHS, CHEMISTRY or PHYSICS.
Bursaries of £13,800 are available for eligible students.
Recruiting NOW Apply online to start in January www.iteach.ac.uk
26 | NewScientist | 25 September 2010
–Street View boo-hoo?–
construct 3D urban models. The Street View cars famously raised privacy concerns in many countries – time will tell whether Truecars face a similar fate. A 3D version of Street View will be just the beginning for the Journey View data set, predicts Tony King-Smith of graphics
chip designer Imagination Technologies, based in Kings Langley, UK. “Navteq’s 3D technology will help drive some next-generation apps that look like being fun and engaging,” he says. Mattila showcased a version of his system at Nokia World in London last week. Paul Marks n
Trap the solar wind and our energy worries are over FORGET conventional solar power – the world’s energy needs could be met 100 billion times over using a satellite to harness the solar wind and beam the energy back to Earth. Focussing the beam could be tricky, though. The Dyson-Harrop satellite, as the new design is called, orbits the sun far from Earth. On board a long copper wire generates a magnetic field that snags the electrons in the solar wind. The electrons are funnelled into a receiver to produce a current, which generates the wire’s magnetic field to make the system self-sustaining. Any current not needed for the magnetic field powers an infrared laser, which beams energy back to Earth. A satellite with a 1-kilometre-long copper wire, sitting the same distance from the sun as the Earth, could generate 1 billion billion gigawatts of power, “100 billion times the power humanity currently requires”, says Brooks Harrop of Washington State University in Pullman who designed the satellite (International Journal
of Astrobiology, vol 9, p 88). However, to draw significant amounts of power, a Dyson-Harrop satellite needs a constant solar wind that’s only found high above the ecliptic – the plane defined by the Earth’s orbit around the sun. That means the satellite must sit so far from Earth that the laser beam would spread to cover thousands of square
“A Dyson-Harrop satellite could generate 100 billion times the power humanity currently needs” kilometres by the time it reached us. A sharp beam “would require stupendously huge optics”, says John Mankins of Artemis Innovation in Santa Maria, California. He also points out that the wire could burn out due to the huge current coursing through it. But he does say that a smaller version of this “clever and interesting” satellite could help power some space missions. Charles Choi n