Engineering Research - By Students Nic Clarke, Graham Bennett and Troy Munro
Jonathan Binns, Thursday, 1 September 2011
In collaboration with the Australian Maritime College and the University of Melbourne, Virtual Sailing is continuing its R&D program on the engineering of the simulators. Nic Clarke (AMC) and Graham Bennett (UniMelb) conducted another set of experiments at Albert Park lake in June using the system developed by Graham. With Nic being test pilot we've been able to repeat all these experiments on the simulator and now we finally have the direct comparisons we wanted. Nic and Graham are due to submit very soon!
Testign in Albert Park Lake
Nic Defending his poster at a recent University of Tasmania postgrad conference
Troy Munro's final year project is also coming to an end. He has been reinstalling the rudder motor from UniMelb and installing a toe strap load measurement device and a custom load pin to directly measure heeling moment. Result of the comparison between simulated rudder movements with and without force feedback to full scale measurements are showing some very interesting features. The load measurements are also showing the potential of the simulator to accurately determine a range of resultant forces from all that effort that goes into sailing. Troy's full report will be available soon.
Nic and Troy testing on the simulator
The custom load pin at the end of the heel ram used to directly measure heeling moment
Thanks to the engineering research team for 2011: Chris Manzie, Denny Oetomo, Graham Bennett, Jonathan Binns, Nic Clarke, Troy Munro, Norman Saunders and Mark Habgood.
Spinal Cord Injury Network releases new brochure on exercise and spinal cord injury
Jonathan Binns, Thursday, 25 August 2011
The Spinal Cord Injury Network of Australia and New Zealand have released their new brochure on exercise specifically aimed at the spinal cord injury community. Exercise for people with spinal cord injuries is particularly important in that it reduces risk of secondary complications, increases strength and can significantly reduce anxiety, loneliness and depression.
Virtual Sailing has been recognised as a providor of exercise and rehabilitation equipment. See the full brochure at spinalnetwork.org.au/node/3081, and see the video presented below on YouTube.
Rehabilitation Sailing Centres Opened in Auckland and Baltimore
Jonathan Binns, Wednesday, 24 August 2011
VS-Access simulators have now been in clinics in Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland (Figure 1) and Baltimore (Figure 2) for a few years. As introductions to disabled sailing these are proving to be extremely valuable tools. Full trials are due to start soon in Baltimore.
Figure 1: Auckland
Figure 2: Baltimore
Tim and Jan heading for London
Jonathan Binns, Wednesday, 24 August 2011
Kiwi sailors Tim Dempsey and Jan Apel are well on track to compete in the London Paralympics!
One of the most inspiring aspects of being involved with disabled sailing is to see how people like Tim and Jan compete on the world stage. See the link to YouTube below for some of their story (Jan's been using a VS simulator for over a year now).
Postgraduate scholarship opportunity in Maritime Engineering
Jonathan Binns, Monday, 11 October 2010
The Australian Maritime College, in collaboration with Virtual Sailing Pty Ltd and the University of Melbourne, was awarded a research grant by the Australian Research Council to investigate high fidelity sailing simulation.
As a part of this research a Master of Philosophy project has been conducted over the last 18 months developing the equipment shown in the pictures above. Now that this initial phase of the project is over a new Master of Philosophy project will begin to look at incorporating the results into the actual simulator. For this purpose a new scholarship is available.
The successful applicant will be required to enrol in a Masters research program at either the Australian Maritime College or the University of Melbourne. Research experience in signal conditioning and data acquisition for the marine environment will be highly regarded but not essential. International applicants must provide all tuition fees and mandatory overseas health cover if applicable.
The scholarship is open for applications, closing on 5th November 2010. The successful applicant will be eligible to receive a scholarship of $22,500 p.a. for 18 months to pursue a Master of Philosophy by research in engineering.
The Masters research program will be dedicated to the conduct of physical and simulated experiments. The resulting correlation will provide the foundation for future simulator development. The data generated and published in the public domain will be the first of its kind in any form of maritime simulation.
This project is an exciting opportunity for a recent graduate to practice their new found skills and gain valuable postgraduate qualifications.
Applicants should submit a full CV to:
Dr Jonathan Binns
NCMEH, AMC
Locked Bag 1395
Launceston Tasmania
7250 Australia Phone:+61 3 6324 9847 Email: jrbinns@amc.edu.au
Increasing Virtual Reality Immersion and Boat-to-Boat Interaction
Jonathan Binns, Launceston, Tasmania, Australia, Saturday, 3 April 2010
Two new student projects are being conducted at the Australian Maritime College in 2010. The first is looking at the effect of increased immersion in the virtual reality environment on learning, the second at the incorporation of boat-to-boat interaction.
Dr Jonathan Binns is supervising two new exciting student projects at the Australian Maritime College in 2010.
Firstly Marian Gheorghe is investigating the effect of increasing degrees of immersion in the virtual reality environment on the ability to teach students the spatial awareness skills required for effective sail training. A higher degree of immersion than is usual possible with a typical VS setup is possible with the incorporation of Head Mounted Displays (HMDs). These devices have reduced in price remarkably over the last few years and are very robust in their construction. They have inbuilt head tracking capability through accelerometers and compasses, such that the simulator can detect small head rotations (such as looking for the mark over your shoulder) and then adjust the image projected onto the display accordingly. In this way, although the Field of View (FOV) remains constant the Field of Reference (FOR, or the amount of the scenery that the user can see) is extended to 360o. This creates an increase in degree of immersion. However, the real question is, "does increasing degree of immersion increase the teaching capacity of sailing simulation?". Marian will conducted an in depth analysis of the hardware and learning capacity.
Virtual Sailing is supporting this project by providing access to the simulator based at the AMC and by re-programing the simulation to accept data from two different Head Mounted Displays (HMDs). The two HMDs are very similar apart from the head tracking hardware used by each. It appears from initial testing that the tracking is much smoother for the eMagin HMD. It's now up to Marian to measure quantitaively how much smoother it is and if that really effects learning.
Figure 1 - Jonathan testing the Vuzix HMD
Figure 2 - Jonathan testing the eMagin HMD
The second project is being conducted by Nic Clark and is replicating a study conducted for the 32nd America's Cup (for which Dr Binns helped out) in which Prof Len Imas predicted boat-to-boat aerodynamic interaction for use by America's Cup navigators (see http://www.hpyd.org.nz/docs/HPYD3-abstracts.pdf for an abstract of Lennie's paper). This is actually the key to any sail racing strategy and yet it is actually one of the most difficult studies to perform. The only feasible method of investigating such phenomena is to use the most advanced computer modelling possible, thanks to Len Imas' work we know it is possible to get useful results. Nic's job is to simplify the computational results to such a level that could be implemented into the sailing simulator whilst still retaining the fidelity to real life.
The first stage in this study is to measure realistic flying shapes. For this purpose we were lucky enough to borrow a Laser sailing dinghy and a few cameras last week. The initial resulting images are shown in Figure 3 (Jonathan was the happy skipper). Nic is currently working hard on getting these images digitised.
Figure 3 - Flying shapes from the Laser dinghy test sessions
