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The Pixel Factory
- matiasb 11y agoCool!
- fredley 11y agoThis is incredible. I've learned a lot of this before, but without the awesome slides, but this presentation makes most of it so easy to understand that it becomes obvious that that's how these problems should be approached. It really does go to show how much of a difference presentation goes to aid learning and (more importantly) understanding.
- AshleysBrain 11y agoExceptional visualisations! At least for me, seeing things like the camera zooming so it's placed between the perfect-vector world and rasterised world just makes it so clear. A picture is worth a thousand words, but a visualisation like that may be worth ten thousand.
- kelsolaar 11y agoImpressive and really efficient presentation (not surprising from Steven Wittens).
- desuvader 11y agoGreat job, Steven. I don't think I have ever seen anything like this before on the web. This was extremely fun to watch/read. I'll be taking a look at MathBox.js and see if I can build something fun with it as well.
- joosters 11y agoIf you haven't seen his website front page, it's well worth a look too: http://acko.net/ http://acko.net/ I think it's been on HN before, It was the first WebGL site I've seen that just worked.
- GaiusCoffee 11y agoAmazing! :D Learned a lot about pixels
- ChicagoBoy11 11y agoIncredible work!
- shultays 11y agoGreat presentation, however I must say the transition effect on texts are a bit too much. As soon as they appear I try to read them but they move around for a half second. A bit annoying
- chrismorgan 11y agoAny one of these diagrams is the sort of thing that in one fell swoop demonstrates a principle and how something works, where a lecturer at Uni may spend twenty minutes with a couple of diagram and plenty of hand gestures and produce an inferior result. The combination of them all together makes this the sort of thing that would be a superb basis for more complete educational/training materials.
- jacobolus 11y agoThe thing is, a lecturer spends 20 minutes doodling this and can explain most of the same, especially if there is some ability to directly interact with the audience and clear up misconceptions. Maybe in the worst case a good lecturer takes twice as long to get the explanation across. If need-be, the lecturer can elaborate on any piece, or draw a completely new picture as the situation demands. By contrast, making the fancy animated version takes 20 hours, plus another several hundred hours (or perhaps 1-2 orders of magnitude more) to build the framework underneath. Even better would be to make interactive explanations, but that would take dramatically more work than even the animated version. If someone can spare the time to do it, it obviously has tremendous value, but each animator can only explain a tiny number of things in this medium, compared to, say writing a whole book with the same amount of effort. It’s similar to the contrast between telling hundreds of stories around the campfire or writing a novel vs. animating a few minutes of a Disney film. Ideally we’d have ten thousand skilled animator/programmer/educators working on creating such explanations, sharing tools and ideas, coordinating effort to build more complete curricula, etc., but there’s not currently anyone paying them to do it, so today there are only a handful, working as volunteer hobbyists. There’s no incentive for current educators (say, college professors or high school teachers or textbook authors) to spend their time making this kind of thing, since it’s not an established and recognized genre yet, and a vanishingly small proportion of them have the requisite skills.
- efaref 11y agoBut you only have to spend those 20 hours once.
- chrismorgan 11y ago
- detaro 11y agoGreat presentation, although I didn't finish it because the load times between steps got to annoying (it seems like they only load when you switch to the next slide, instead of preloading at least the next one or two slides)
- bobajeff 11y agoYeah, my issue isn't loading times. But the need to press a button (a small button on my phone) for the next slide instead of using a swipe gesture. It's still a great well crafted presentation. I've been given a much better understanding of some graphics concepts than I otherwise would. Will definitly come back and finish it.
- bendykstra 11y ago> Note: these slides have not (yet) been optimized for low-end GPUs or mobile. Wow, yeah. I'm using an old laptop with Ubuntu. Firefox ground to a halt, crashed and then my computer spontaneously rebooted.
- benihana 11y agoThat's a bummer. It was a gorgeous experience on my gaming rig with a 144hz monitor.
- thegeomaster 11y agoYeah, it's a bummer. I have a desktop a bit on the low-end (though I don't usually have problems), and Firefox hung on me, even the music playing in another tab started getting jerky. Didn't get to see the slides :(
- pcr0 11y agoOn a Macbook Air here. Presentation went smoothly but fan was on full blast, and CPU/GPU temp went above 60C. Very cool.
- SSLy 11y agoJust to chime in, the presentation works great on latest firefox, arch linux, intel hd4600 in mobile cpu.
- iso8859-1 11y agoYou should probably switch to software rendering; this could be a security issue.
- Aldo_MX 11y agoThe presentation worked better in Opera (Chromium) for me. I got a laptop with Intel HD 3000 graphics.
- sagarm 11y agoIt worked surprisingly well on my 2014 Moto X. Not 60 fps, but no slideshow either.
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- fenomas 11y agoSee also the same author's presentation "Making WebGL Dance, or How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love Linear Algebra". http://acko.net/files/fullfrontal/fullfrontal/webglmath/online.html http://acko.net/files/fullfrontal/fullfrontal/webglmath/onli... (Shares some slides with the new one)
- hacker_9 11y agoWow this is incredible stuff. I work with shaders everyday so have an understanding of the concepts discussed, but I've never visualized them like that! Really captivating.
- sergiotapia 11y agoI feel lucky I get to watch these slides at 5K resolution on my iMac! Amazing!
- transfire 11y agoSigh. Running the latest Fedora on an AMD A10 with Firefox and this barely works at all.
- paganel 11y agoIt blocks my latest FF on a 3-year old Mac Mini with 4GB or memory. That's not much, but that's not ancient technology, either.
- waynecochran 11y agoI am teaching Computer Graphics for about the 15th time this fall. I have always wanted to to an animation of the GL pipeline -- I think it would explain a lot -- maybe this will inspire me to do so. The problem, is soon as I finish, the pipeline will change, technology will switch, and it will soon be archaic. This is a huge amount of work! I applaud the herculean effort and great result.
- Animats 11y agoThat's beautiful. WebGL makes you realize that all the "designers" fooling around with CSS are playing in the kiddie pool. Of course, as soon as you use WebGL, users expect the visual quality of an AAA game. What you tend to get is crap like this.[1] It's possible to get the GPU to do great things for you.[2] But that's a programming exercise. Good 3D content is expensive. Most of the WebGL demos available either have very little content, or are recycling old video games. All this technology, already deployed, and little good content for it. [1] http://montagejs.github.io/beachplanetblog/ http://montagejs.github.io/beachplanetblog/ [2] http://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/ http://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/
- angersock 11y agoWebGL has some other, less-flashy uses. I've worked around some really shitty canvas performance by switching to a WebGL backend, because of dumb memory leaks on IE.
- ThomPete 11y agoA picture might be worth a thousand words, but animation is worth a thousand pictures. The way animation illuminates an understanding of the holistic wholeness rather than the discrete part normal education teaches, is so underutilized in education. Heres to hoping someone soon will specialize in creating animated educational material.
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- wodenokoto 11y agoWhat does this guy do for a living? Research, teach? Develop? Whatever it is, I'm amazed he has time to make these incredible 3D presentations.
- vikrantpogula 11y agoThese slides are the best way to learn graphics! It also shows the true potential of the web !!
- axxu 11y agoThis is great, I'm a complete noob and I learned a lot! Something that I didn't understand though is how sampling rate and the justification for Apple's Retina are related (slide 31). I probably just don't know enough about either, but I'd greatly appreciate it if someone could explain. :)
- lionhearted 11y agoMy mind is totally blown. Does anyone know if the author has written or presented on his workflow as he goes from idea, to concept, to rough draft, to finished product? I'd really love to learn how he goes about it... Pixel Factory was so dense and clear thinking, beautiful, intuitive. Wow.
- irascible 11y agoThe author of this is both a programmer and an artist. Totally inspiring work.
- pieter_mj 11y agoAs with previous presentations, the author has struck educational gold so to speak.