Was hoping my translation of chaff would motivate a gentle push towards the subject of interest, Arcam's new machine. Or was that chaff?
The grant was given to a group studying how to increase the efficiency of 3d image processing at least in the translation I was reading. Interested are "numerous companies from the Bavarian IT industry, land surveying, the film and television industry, camera, sporting goods and seed producers." I don't want to speculate on how image processing is used in each company but there is an enormous amount of data, possibly a virtually uncountable number of points of data with nothing that says that one point is connected to another when both data points belong to the same object. So how does a computer distinguish between two objects? Distance, color, and form don't do the job. Tesla claims its first fatal autopilot accident was due to its computer confusing a truck with the sky; if true, to me, that's no surprise. Computers don't have situational awareness. It's a huge problem.
Onto what really interests us. Large vacuum chambers exist, outer space is the biggest one in the universe, so I've been curious for some time about factors that have limited the size of Arcam build chambers. There might be only one limiting factor, cost.