Wednesday, April 17, 2013

A Gaussian surface within a charged distribution.

The addition of charged distributions and Gaussian surfaces provides for much more sophisticated visualizations. This example includes a a charged sphere with inner radius a=20 and outer radius b=50. At the center of the charged sphere is a Gaussian surface of radius 10. Zoom in on the image to see that the electric field does not penetrate the Gaussian surface, and that the Gaussian surface is completely within the hollow center of the sphere.

Working through the details to get a reasonable appearance for nested translucent objects without complex rendering was definitely challenging.

Monday, April 1, 2013

SXSW Feedback

I was able put together a proof of concept and show it off to a lot of people at SXSW, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Based on that feedback I have expanded the documentation, made the project easier to use and more modular, and put it out as an open source project on GitHub.

Next I will be adding the ability to specify charge densities, such as a charged sphere, line, plane or ring, and also the ability to automatically generate the field lines without needing to specify a starting point to trace the field lines.

I also spent some time covering some fascinating material on the interplay between neuroscience and learning. One of the talks drew an interesting car analogy. To paraphrase, pedagogy and psychology are like learning to drive fast, where neuroscience is like opening the hood and understand how the car achieves it's speed. This would undoubtedly make you a better driver.

Some of the more interesting items included

Well, after digesting all that I am going to work out the code to display a charge distribution on a web page – that means a volumetric rendering that will function well on highly limited devices such as a cell phone.