As promised here, Quentin, our Virtual Race Contest Winner, shares his thoughts about the Offhore Racing with Michel Desjoyeaux 3D Serious Game compared to the real thing.

Keep 3D-ing,

Rich

Remember Big Frog, the French Challenge at the Reno National Air Races?

The Reno National Air Races are the fastest races in the world. Aircrafts compete in breathtaking races 50 ft above the ground, driven by the famous motto: “Go fast, fly low, turn left!”

An american specialty, the only foreign victory ever was French: Michel Detroyat way back in 1936 on a Caudron with a Renault engine.

Big Frog wanted to follow Detroyat’s track, with an extra-challenge: use a diesel-cycle engine!

A candidate of choice for the Passion for Innovation Program, which welcomed the Team, providing them with CATIA, SIMULIA and Dassault Systèmes experts’ support. Read the full story here.

For their first participation in Reno this year, the Team established on wednesday a whole set of World Premières :

- first diesel-powered racer designed and simulated on computer (with our CATIA and SIMULIA solutions)

- first diesel-powered aircraft to succed in qualifying at the Reno National Air Races

- and above all, first diesel-powered aircraft victory and in his first race!

This first victory rewards the skills, involvement and passion of the whole Team and the excellence of French technologies, including our 3D design and simulation solutions, the SMA innovative diesel-cycle aero-engine and the perfect intergration of all those elements in the NXT airframe thanks to the Passion for Innovation Program.

Last but not least, congratulations to the pilot, French Air Force Captain Christophe Delbos. Usually a Mirage 2000 fighter pilot, “Bobos” (his official pilot nickname) made a perfect race. Diving on the first pylon like an eagle, he grabbed the race first position right from the start and kept it during the race six laps! According to him, the aircraft went quite well, allowing him to fully concentrate on clean trajectories until he heard the “Race finished” announcement in his helmet.

Once a curiosity after his qualification, Big Frog is now one of the stars of those 2011 Reno Air Races. No doubt Michel Detroyat would be proud of his successors.

Gentlemen, you have a victory! May it be the first one of a long collection!

Keep 3D-ing,
Rich

As part of our Passion for Innovation sponsorship program, Dassault Systèmes partnered with Scoutek and Leeds University, UK, in 2009, supporting the Djedi Robot Mission to explore the mysterious shafts in the Great Pyramid.

If the Passion for Innovation initiative allows us to provide financial support for this innovative project our strength lies, above all, in our ability to add our 3D engineering competency and cutting-edge 3D technology to such missions.

My team and I are proud to be a part of this cross-disciplinary and innovative team, selected by the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities to send a robot probe named Djedi into the Queen’s Chamber shafts and explore parts of the Great Pyramid hidden from human eyes for 4,500 years.

Last week stories from New Scientist, Discovery, CNN and others broke the news that the Djedi robot had revealed some previously undiscovered hieroglyphs in one of the shafts and relayed these never seen before images.

These images and mission reports were published in the 84th edition of Annales du Service Des Antiquités de l’Egypte (ASAE), the official publication of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.

The robot has been designed and simulated in 3D to make sure it would work on the field right from the start and would be easily maintained in operations.

But 3D is not only a tool for engineers and we believe that the best way to experience this adventure for yourself is through 3D experiences we are able to deliver. We spent this weekend capturing images in real-time, in a virtual 3D world, to help the public -all publics- understand what the robot has seen.

You’ll see the robot and its environment in full context.  Without need for words, you’ll understand the technical challenge as you’ll see Djedi navigate itself through a 20cmx20cm tunnel in the pyramid.

We would like to remind the public that, as exciting as this work is, it is a work in progress.  We still have much to learn from Djedi, and Egyptologists still must interpret the meaning and significance of the hieroglyphs.

“Red-painted numbers and graffiti are very common around Giza,” says Peter Der Manuelian, an Egyptologist at Harvard University and a Passion for Innovation partner. “They are often masons’ or work-gangs’ marks, denoting numbers, dates or even the names of the gangs.”

3D has a way of turning question marks into exclamation points, and we enjoy sharing this with you.

Best,

Mehdi

Mehdi is the Interactive Strategy Director at Dassault Systèmes.