[Coco] Virtual Reality

[johnmarkmelanie at gmail.com]

All,

What if there was a way to take a number of 3D images and stitch them together somehow?

Link #1
https://www.tnmoc.org/news-releases/2017/6/6/3d-virtual-tour-now-online

Link #2 The 3D Virtual Tour:
https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=Vz8kCqGRjQA

The National Museum of Computing
3D Virtual Tour
by John Mark Mobley
The National Museum of Computing is in a section of Bletchley Park. The normal entrance to Bletchley Park will not gain you entrance to the museum. If you go, you need to somehow find the correct entrance. First you travel to the United Kingdom then you find Bletchley Park and then you find the correct entrance to the museum. But what if you could somehow tour the museum online?

By clicking on the circles on the floor you can move around the museum. You can click and drag the mouse to turn from side to side or up and down. You can zoom in and out. Also notice the mask with two eyes and a nose in the lower right-hand corner (This is an old newsletter article, and the mask is not there anymore). This is for virtual reality using a smartphone and a $15.00 device called Google Cardboard.

The Google Cardboard requires that you swivel around in a chair or stand up and turn around in order to navigate. There are floating blue dots that by positioning the cursor over them for several seconds will cause you to relocate to the location of the blue dot.
So if you cannot go to the museum then perhaps the museum can come to you.
Unfortunately, the virtual tour gives the impression of a dead computer museum, but if you go in person, you may find that the computers power up and function. These are functioning computers. The computer in the picture above is the 1951 Harwell Dekatron WITCH computer.
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harwell_computer
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekatron
Each Dekatron tube is a memory or an accumulator that holds a number from 0 to 9 and display all in one.
Other computers include:
EDSAC
Link: https://tinyurl.com/hwgoxce
HEC 1 Computer
Link: https://tinyurl.com/y8q3lsbu
Elliott 803
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_803
Colossus (Not currently part of the virtual tour)
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer
There are four Colossus computers. The first one, Colossus Mark 1, was the one used in World War II that cracked coded messages from the German Lorenz SZ40 teletype/tele-printer. This computer was destroyed. The second one was the Colossus Mark 2, a faster version of its predecessor. It was also destroyed. The third one was in a movie called Colossus: The Forbin Project. The movie was a work of fiction about a very powerful computer that tried to take over the world. The fourth one was a recreation of the Colossus Mark 2. It was completed in 2008 and is at the museum.
Give the virtual tour a try. It is fun. This would be nice for people that are home bound and would like a way to get out and explore.
Next people will want a mobile virtual presence device.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjWfur9at2s

-John Mark Mobley