I have to pick my thesis soon.. and so many cool choices. Personally, I've kinda been into virtual reality.. but some of the other stuff seems to be really useful as well. This thing sort of determines everything I'll be doing in the future, so it is sorta important Hah, honestly, the Combatant project would be something cool to do as a result from this.. thinking of getting enough money to retire for life, then spend the rest of my life making free games. Or work on it part-time.
A bit of a long post.. which is why it's hard for me to choose.
Athlete monitoring
I thought this was pretty cool to start experimentation in VR. There's kinda two different theses to it - the first uses GPS to find the position of a player.. the second tries to get a really small device on an athlete (small enough to be unnoticable) and use it to transmit signals to the server. If I pick this, I'll probably go for the second one, more useful for making a combat game.
Voice stuff
1. Voice identification - Recognizing someone simply by their voice patterns
2. Voice transformer for emotions - Gets say.. a happy tone, and makes the person sound like he's speaking it angrily. Or vice versa. Useful for pulling pranks or RPGs.
3. Voice library - Putting every single word a person has ever said into a 2 TB hard drive. I'm a stalker by heart, so I like this, and it's not too hard either.
4. iPod organizer - Heh, this is a cover up for (3) there. It lets you search voice and music by certain patterns.. think of it as inventing a Google for music/speech.
Hands free mouse - Because it's pretty cool to control a mouse with the power of your brain. Doesn't seem that tough either, but it is a bit boring.
Neural coding - Strap some electrodes to a mouse's head, then use it to monitor how the mouse thinks, and better yet, what he's going to do. Mind reading!
TCP traffic emulator - A big simulation of TCP traffic, because the lecturer wants a test device to handle a huge amount of traffic. Probably the easiest of all the things there and could make me some money too.
Internet switching with optical memory - Cool because it's the next big thing in networking technology. Basically, instead of big, hot electrical wires, we're just going to be using light to handle all the net traffic. This could also earn me a huge salary. Problem is that it means I'd have to invent a way to store light as memory.
Cool stuff I considered but probably won't do:
Bionic eye. Would be ironic to build a bionic eye with the avatar, but I'm not into developing photonic polymers and stuff.
Magnetic levitation system - Using electromagnets to create hover systems Problem is I suck with electromagnetism.
Teleoperation - Making things move from far away. It's nice enough, but not nearly as cool as the rest of the things.
Voice patterns to determine mental state - It's a huge step up from the other voice stuff, which is why I won't do it. Involves a huge amount of signal processing, and I'm barely passing that as it is. What it does is that it takes someone's vocal patterns and determines whether they're stressed, angry, happy, etc.
Modeling and control of human balance - Controlling human balance is pretty awesome, and what I'd like to do with a combat game, but I kinda suck with control systems.
Awesome lifts - Maximizing the efficiency of elevators. Yes, elevators. Basically, you're designing the control of the lift and timing to get people to do it better. Timing the lifts to suit people's lift-waiting patterns, including putting mirrors to make some more patient. Possible money in this, though I don't really want a career as an elevator engineer.
And some mad professor needs an apprentice to help on this..
"Design and build a high-voltage lightning generator that utilises solid-state devices to control the switching"
Edited by Muz
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
Research. Mostly into building a prototype of them. Someone already has a use for it, they just need some monkey assistant to make it for them.
So many topics to choose from, not sure which to take. And seeing how it affects what I'd be doing for the rest of my life it seems pretty important
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
They all do seem very interesting. I am, however, too brain-fried to pick one or even remember what all you listed now. I shall reconsider upon the morrow.
Assault Andy Administrator
I make other people create vaporware
Registered 29/07/2002
Points 5686
6th June, 2009 at 06:53:41 -
What course are you doing Muz? I'm doing a Bachelor of Science, mastering in Engineering. Well that's the plan, I just started first year this year.
Out of your choices, I would say that I like:
Hands free mouse, Neural coding or Bionic eye.
Hands free mouse - this would only be good if you could make it ACTUALLY read what you wanted it to do. It would only be useful if it was fast. There would be little point inventing this if people could do things faster with a physical mouse. Having said that, I know that this sort of technology is in limited use already by quadriplegics and would certainly make their lives a lot easier if you were able to make it as quick as a physical mouse.
Neural coding - Just cool I guess.
Bionic eye - yet again useful to people with disabilities. These sorts of devices already exist but give the viewer limited vision (last I head 9x9 pixel array), although higher resolution versions are being worked on with the eventual goal of 256x256 pixels etc.
Optical memory is hard and lots of people are trying to do that sort of thing. The hurdle you mentioned with "storing light as memory" is a holy grail of that field, so you're right in saying you'd have to invent a way to do that. And if you could then you'd probably get a nobel prize because that would lead to instant optical computers.
So I guess then, my vote is for a Hands-free Mouse, so long as you think you can make it faster than a physical mouse.
Andy:
Doing a Bachelor in Electronics Engineering, specializing mainly in Telecommunications & Networking. Main reason I'm reluctant to take the bionic eye one.. there's a bunch of photonics guys who are better at it than me.
The hands free mouse one will probably be slower than a real mouse, at least whatever prototype I make would be. It may, some day, be faster than a physical mouse, but unlikely. Still, some really lazy people would find it useful. And yeah, quadriplegics.
Heh, the thesis supervisor is a bit jumpy about the optical memory thing.. I guess he found a way to do it, but it's pretty much minimal, like in the sense of a few megabytes. Since UNSW is starting a course in quantum computers from next sem and the guys are doing heavy work into light storage, I think it's already possible. Most of the work would probably be to get it to reroute gigabytes with only that little memory, which would be very painful and very rewarding if successful. Hmm.. think I'll consider doing it.
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
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Hah, honestly, the Combatant project would be something cool to do as a result from this.. thinking of getting enough money to retire for life, then spend the rest of my life making free games. Or work on it part-time.
Edited by Muz
