[ExI] Meat v. Machine

[Samantha Atkins]

On Jan 6, 2011, at 2:03 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 05, 2011 at 06:18:40PM -0600, Damien Broderick wrote:
>> On 1/5/2011 5:57 PM, Jeff Davis wrote:
>> 
>>> If you could sign up to tele-operate a lunar robot, how much would you
>>> pay for the chance to go on that "ride"?
>> 
>> How much would you pay (or how much time expend) to hack into the things  
>> and crash them into each other. Dodgem Cars! See them flying apart in  
>> slow motion!
> 
> There's no need to run these on public networks. And of course you
> would staff the control centers with trained professionals (some
> recruited from the gamer circles, just as today's drone pilots).
> 
> It would be perfectly feasible to make a lunar game world in
> SecondLife, OpenSim or OpenCroquet, with the 2.5 s relativistic
> latency added via FIFO buffers.

You would probably want more realistic physics than any of these offer though.  Last time I looked OpenCroquet had less accessible animation and much worse physics than either.   But certainly this could be done good enough to be fun to play and with enough realism to not have disastrous things happen at the other end.

> 
> I presume the robots will be pretty small, something which
> would fit into a shoebox or maybe as big as a small golf 
> cart. Wheeled chassis would be quite appropriate for many
> locations. For other places one could use something like
> a Big Dog (needs lots more power, and the many joints would
> be a problem).

Yeah, Big Dog runs on an internal combustion engine.  Not sure what you would want to replace it with of equivalent power to weight.   


- samantha