Academics and software engineers from the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester, and Southampton have established the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI), which will partner with about 30 to 40 research communities across the United Kingdom to develop ways to keep their software current and to help them develop it to meet new requirements. SSI will optimize strategies for sustaining software and provide communities with best practices for improving it for future users. “The issue at the moment is that there are no coordinated ways of sustaining important research software once it comes to the end of its funding,” says SSI director Neil Chue Hong. “The creation of the SSI will ensure that important software is sustained so that it can continue to contribute towards high quality research.”
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Flying pixels have the potential to offer a more immersive three-dimensional (3D) viewing experience than 3D television sets, according to engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The engineers describe their unique 3D display, called Flyfire, as a flock of tiny aircraft carrying multicolored light-emitting diodes (LEDs). The pixels can hover in front of a viewer and form an image, but they also can change their position to add greater depth to the image. “It’s a 3D display with a dual aspect–it can show an image like a traditional display, but then those pixels can move and transform into another shape,” says MIT’s E. Roon Kang. The initial proof-of-principle experiments used quad-rotor helicopters more than 10 centimeters across, and the precise control of their altitude was within three centimeters. Kang says it could take at least five years to make a display with 1,000 or more of the small flying pixels. MIT’s Emilio Frazzoli says onboard controls and a central control system also will be needed to coordinate pixel movement.
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