The NASA Augmented/Virtual Reality Lab: The State of the Art at KSC

The NASA Augmented Virtual Reality (AVR) Lab at Kennedy Space Center is dedicated to the investigation of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies, with the goal of determining potential uses of these technologies as human-computer interaction (HCI) devices in an aerospace engineering context. Begun in 2012, the AVR Lab has concentrated on commercially available AR and VR devices that are gaining in popularity and use in a number of fields such as gaming, training, and telepresence. We are working with such devices as the Microsoft Kinect, the Oculus Rift, the Leap Motion, the HTC Vive, motion capture systems, and the Microsoft Hololens. The focus of our work has been on human interaction with the virtual environment, which in turn acts as a communications bridge to remote physical devices and environments which the operator cannot or should not control or experience directly. Particularly in reference to dealing with spacecraft and the oftentimes hazardous environments they inhabit, it is our hope that AR and VR technologies can be utilized to increase human safety and mission success by physically removing humans from those hazardous environments while virtually putting them right in the middle of those environments

The pp-adic Shintani cocycle

The Shintani cocycle on \GL_n(\Q), as constructed by Hill, gives a cohomological interpretation of special values of zeta functions for totally real fields of degree $n$. We give an explicit criterion for a specialization of the Shintani cocycle to be $p$-adically interpolable. As a corollary, we recover the results of Deligne-Ribet, Cassou Nogu\`es and Barsky on the construction of $p$-adic $L$-functions attached to totally real fields.Comment: 19 pages. v2: Corrected several typo

Spontaneously broken parity and consistent cosmology with transitory domain walls

Domain wall structure which may form in theories with spontaneously broken parity is generically in conflict with standard cosmology. It has been argued that Planck scale suppressed effects can be sufficient for removing such domain walls. We study this possibility for three specific evolution scenarios for the domain walls, with evolution during radiation dominated era, during matter dominated era, and that accompanied by weak inflation. We determine the operators permitted by the supergravity formalism and find that the field content introduced to achieve desired spontaneous parity breaking makes possible Planck scale suppressed terms which can potentially remove the domain walls safely. However, the parity breaking scale, equivalently the majorana mass scale $M_R$ of the right handed neutrino, does get constrained in some of the cases, notably for the matter dominated evolution case which would be generic to string theory inspired models giving rise to moduli fields. One left-right symmetric model with only triplets and bidoublets is found to be more constrainted than another admitting a gauge singlet

Entire functions with Julia sets of positive measure

Let f be a transcendental entire function for which the set of critical and asymptotic values is bounded. The Denjoy-Carleman-Ahlfors theorem implies that if the set of all z for which |f(z)|>R has N components for some R>0, then the order of f is at least N/2. More precisely, we have log log M(r,f) > (N/2) log r - O(1), where M(r,f) denotes the maximum modulus of f. We show that if f does not grow much faster than this, then the escaping set and the Julia set of f have positive Lebesgue measure. However, as soon as the order of f exceeds N/2, this need not be true. The proof requires a sharpened form of an estimate of Tsuji related to the Denjoy-Carleman-Ahlfors theorem.Comment: 17 page

Lifetime assessment for an ideal elastoplastic thick-walled spherical member under general mechanochemical corrosion conditions

The problem of the equal-rate mechanochemical wear of an elastic-perfectly plastic thick-walled spherical shell under internal and external pressure is solved analytically. The proposed solution allows to assess the time of the initial yielding at the bore of the shell and the time of fully plastic yielding. The obtained formulas are to be used for design purposes and as a benchmark solution for numerical analysis