CAPE CANAVERAL — Multibillion-dollar contracts NASA is expected to award as soon as Thursday will establish the fleet of U.S. vehicles servicing theInternational Space Station into the next decade, and could introduce a new spacecraft to Kennedy Space Center. The space agency was scheduled to announce the winners of contracts to deliver cargo to the space station on unmanned craft between 2018 and 2024, decisions that have been delayed multiple times this year.The incumbent cargo haulers, SpaceX and Orbital ATK , hope to continue their services, while Boeing and Sierra Nevada Corp. hope to claim a piece of the action that could be worth up to $14 billion. For Sierra Nevada, which last year lost out to Boeing and SpaceX on contracts to fly astronauts, the cargo deals offer a second and perhaps last chance to bring the Dream Chaser mini-shuttle to life.
By using a software that powers sports video games, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) have developed a system that automatically converts 2D video of soccer games into 3D. The converted video can be played back over any 3D device -- a commercial 3D TV, Google's new Cardboard system which turns smartphones into 3D displays or special-purpose displays such as Oculus Rift. "Any TV these days is capable of 3D. There's just no content. So we see that the production of high-quality content is the main thing that should happen," says Wojciech Matusik, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Today's video games generally store very detailed 3D maps of the virtual environment that the player is navigating. When the player initiates a move, the game adjusts the map accordingly and, on the fly, generates a 2D projection of the 3D scene that correspond...
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