Yes! This really feels next-gen. After all, you're not actually interested in editing the 2D image, that's just an array of pixels, you want to edit what it represents. And this approach allows exactly that. Will be very interesting to see where this leads!
Or analogous of how you convert audio waveform data into frequencies with the fast-fourier transform, modify it in the frequency spectrum and convert it back into waveform again.
Their examples does however only look a bit like distorted pixel data. The hands of the children seem to warp with the cloth, something they could have easily prevented.
The cloth also looks very static despite it being animated, mainly because the shading of it never changes.
If they had more information about the scene from multiple cameras (or perhaps inferred from the color data), the Gaussian splat would be more accurate and could even incorporate the altered angle/surface-normal after modification to cleverly simulate the changed specular highlights as it animates.
But very, very few of the overall flights in the US are coast to coast non-stop. The average regional flight length (which is what something like this is targeting) in the US is 510 miles (~820 km)[1]. Overall average length of flight 941 miles (~1514 km)[2]:
That's only partially true if you are West of the Mississippi.
When I fly in and out of Cincinnati (where I live) I very often get routed through Chicago, which is under 300 miles away. This thing could make the trip three times between each recharge.
Cincinnati to New York is under 600 miles, still within this aircraft's range with lots of safety margin.
New York to Miami is a little over 1000 miles, which is probably too far with safety margin but close. That's a hugely popular route.
The big elephant in the room in terms of energy is that we have no energy problem. None. Zero. Free energy rains from the sky all day long and we have loads of wind, hydro, and nuclear power too. What we have is an energy storage problem. Fossil fuels are so popular because they are conveniently stored dispatchable energy, not because they are just "energy." If batteries get good enough we are done.
> The big elephant in the room in terms of energy is that we have no energy problem. None. Zero. [...] If batteries get good enough we are done.
But if batteries do get good enough, then we'll just use and waste more energy, and then we'll run out again, right? It's like how software bloat expands to match the available hardware resources. So maybe it's better to act as if things are scarce even if they're not.
forget all these big-city connections. all the regional airports that are a 30m flight from these hubs will eat this kind of service right up. here in burlington, vt all our flights basically go through NYC anyhow, so a regular electric service from here to get to the big planes would be a huge win. there's plenty of airports like ours
You need to have about 50% more range than just the distance between airports (really, enough for two failed landings and a diversion to your most distant alternate) for the sake of having a safety margin, but I see what you're getting at.
It depends on how easy is to make batteries quick to swap. No need for ultra fast charging, they could just use a spare battery pack then the discharged one would go to the next plane after charging. If they find a way to say open a hatch and have the giant battery pack slide out to be replaced by a already fully recharged spare one, the stop could be as quick as changing horses to a carriage.
Fun! I would recommend relating characters based on their function, pronunciation, origin rather than their place in the alphabet. For example B has more in common with P than with C. Similar for D and T, G/K, I/J/Y.
I think Tolkien's Feanor's Tengwar might have been inspired by phonetically-inspired indic scripts, and it certainly relates characters more nicely than alphabetical order does.
