The resources of those individual machines will then be pooled to create a massive computing "grid, " a virtual computer that is more powerful than the fastest supercomputers.
Many schools have integrated Organic Motion's system into their gaming, animation, virtual reality, computer science, and life science classes.
It contrasts sharply with the strikingly vivid and anatomically correct virtual patients on the computer screen nearby.
Microsoft abused its virtual monopoly in the computer world to muscle out smaller rivals, especially those that make media players and software for servers.
In a step beyond the virtual pet Tamagotchi, computer simulations like the PlayStation game Tokimeki Memorial provide the lovelorn with the experience of dating a girl.
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One online firm, Plenus, runs a popular web portal called NetMarble which does a good business selling everything from virtual hats and handbags to virtual plastic surgery for computer avatars.
Released just prior to All-Star weekend, Adrenalyn allows kids to set up their own decks of virtual cards and use the stats to compete against the computer or each other in virtual basketball.
Students at Carnegie Mellon designed for us a computer-aided virtual locking system.
"For anyone who witnessed the onset of computers and the dawn of video games, 'Tron' spoke to a lot of us with concepts about what it was like to be inside a computer or a virtual world, " he said.
Once a design is set, different bits of the manufacturing process are tried out on computer: a virtual pipe-bending machine, for instance, makes sure that the fuel lines which snake their way through the airframe can be created without wrapping themselves around the machine and bringing it to a halt.
Adrenalyn lets today's kids do something like that online, where a player losing a computer competition sees his virtual card swallowed up and uploaded to the winner's account.
While 2K Sports dominates the NBA basketball video game space with its NBA 2K11, it has faced serious competition from Sony Computer Entertainment on the virtual baseball diamond over the years.
Ms. Charlton of Clos-ette says a new feature she's including in recent designs is a "virtual styling tool" consisting of computer screens and iPads set up in the closet so people can work remotely with a stylist who has a visual inventory of their clothes to scroll through.
The secure communication link is a virtual private network communication link over the computer network in which one or more data values that vary according to a pseudo-random sequence are inserted into each data packet.
By pulling apart the hardware and software of a computer, the technology allows multiple virtual machines to share the same hardware resources without conflict.
And no matter what the Cell does to the broader computer-industry landscape, the virtual game-vistas it will conjure up are certain to look fantastic.
For those tracking the growing malicious elements on the Web, Chrome's innovation--and GreenBorder's contribution to the open-source browser--is a technology known as "sandboxing, " a tactic that limits Web applications' access to a computer's memory beyond a virtual border.
To process the MRI data, a computer overlaid on Pickens' brain a virtual three-dimensional grid of 50, 000 cubes called voxels (a word hinting at volume and pixels).
To do this, you could run a "Monte Carlo simulation" in which you plug historical weather data into a computer and then roll a pair of virtual dice 10, 000 times.
They met in 1984 at a Ben Rosen-Esther Dyson computer conference and started going on "virtual dates" by driving to the same movie at the same time in different cities and discussing it on their cell phones.
As those tools are manipulated by a student, the computer works out where they are inside the virtual body and then tells the motors how much resistance to put up when he tries to move them.
They are programmed into the virtual model as well, creating a detailed virtual city which anyone can navigate with the click of a computer mouse.
The coding language Java, he points out, is designed to sandbox itself, creating virtual walls around applications that limit their access to the host computer's resources.
Like a motion-controlled video gaming system, the Virtual Music Instrument employs a camera that is mounted on a computer screen and aimed at someone, capturing their gestures.
His researchers are working on virtual stores for a retail firm and a three-dimensional computer version of the city of Coventry for use by architects and planners in local government.
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"We are very interested in music where you have real instruments on stage and virtual sound sources, which can be coming directly from the computer or transformed from the real-time recording of instruments onstage, " he says.
Now, he can get one of his virtual cells to perform for ten minutes using that same amount of computer time.
He has explored crystal growth, and developed, with a specialist in nature-related algorithms, a 3-D program mimicking the way crystals actually grow over millions of years (with this particular program, he and the scientists he has been working with made virtual crystals grow directly on a ring-like structure on their computer, almost instantly, then manufactured them with a 3-D printer).
Game players tend to be early adapters of any new technology, from specialized high-speed graphics chip sets to surround-sound computer speakers, that promises a more complete immersion in the virtual world.
Three possibilities proposed by Cox: a "peer-to-peer" social network, a cluster of "virtual individual servers" running on a cloud service such as Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud, and "hybrid decentralization, " a mix of the two approaches.
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