[Flightgear-devel] update

[Curtis L. O. <cu...@me...>]

I just wanted to give you all a litte [personal] update and let you
know that if you have sent me email directly, I am not intentionally
ignoring you.  It is all sitting in my inbox and someday I hope to get
caught up.

My job has been sucking up a huge amount of extra time this week and I
haven't been home before 11pm any night this week ... tuesday night I
got home at 2am ...

We are prepairing a state patrol squad car with gps, data recording,
heads up display, and a few other goodies for a research project next
week.  My part in all of this was to develop the HUD software in
OpenGL running on QNX.  The HUD draws the lane edges so you can drive
without seeing the road.  (I.e. high fog, snow, night+rain, etc.)

I actually got to drive the squad car on a winston cup race track
blind using only the hud yesterday (and lived to tell about it.) :-)
Interesting observation for all of you who have played racing games
and have had trouble judging the maximum speed you can get by with
going through the virtual corners ... same exact problem when you are
driving in a real car just seeing the hud (not seeing the road) ...
No one went off the road, but there was a couple close calls. :-)

The days have been really long, and there has been plenty of
frustration to go around trying to get all the pieces to work
together, but to get to see it all in action is pretty cool.

Anyway, between that project this week, and being out at SFO last
week, that is why I haven't been very visible lately.  Next week I may
be back up an brainerd international speedway (some of day's of
thunder filmed there) to support the actual research project so I'm
not sure if I can see the light at the end of the tunnel quite yet.

Regards,

Curt.
-- 
Curtis Olson   Human Factors Research Lab       FlightGear Project
Twin Cities    cu...@hf...                cu...@fl...
Minnesota      http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt   http://www.flightgear.org