7 ms·

Nasa's Visual Universe

167 points by ArtWomb 8y ago

Keyframe 8y ago
Interesting, but the site made my computer crawl almost to a halt. Computer which is used for (and good at it) advanced rendering and simulations. A 12 core machine with two modern GPUs inside. Modern Web, and chrome, is a travesty.
- codydh 8y ago
  Interestingly runs fine for me on Safari 12.0.3 on a midrange 2017 MacBook Pro 15".
  - Angostura 8y ago
    Same here on a late 2013 bog standard 21" iMac
- rrdharan 8y ago
  Works fine in Safari on my four year old iPad Mini.
- zamalek 8y ago
  Must be something weird with your browser configuration. My phone doesn't break a sweat at 60fps.
- magduf 8y ago
  Works just fine on my crappy corporate Windows computer with Chrome.
- espeed 8y ago
  What drivers are you using? I'm running Chrome 72 at 4K on a 50" monitor via KDE Plasma and Fedora 29 on Kernel 4.20, using only an AMD Ryzen 5 2400g ASIC, and it runs just fine (so it does work on the desktop in at least that configuration). I did however manually build the latest ROCm [1] and Vulkan [2]. I would check your flags and check your settings to make sure you have the right optimizations. chrome://flags chrome://chrome-urls BTW: For whatever reason, in certain builds under some combination of settings, the times I've experienced Chrome running at a crawl, it's usually been an issue with GPU rasterization. These are the settings I have disabled (everything else is set to hardware accelerated or enabled)... chrome://gpu Out-of-process Rasterization: Disabled Hardware Protected Video Decode: Hardware accelerated Rasterization: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled Skia Deferred Display List: Disabled Skia Renderer: Disabled Surface Control: Disabled Here's my full Command Line: /usr/bin/google-chrome-stable --disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds --enable-native-gpu-memory-buffers --force-device-scale-factor=1 --enable-accelerated-video --enable-accelerated-mjpeg-decode --flag-switches-begin --enable-audio-focus --enable-experimental-web-platform-features --enable-google-branded-context-menu --enable-oop-rasterization --enable-quic --enable-zero-copy --ignore-gpu-blacklist --enable-lcd-text --load-media-router-component-extension=1 --enable-hardware-overlays=single-fullscreen,single-on-top,underlay --enable-features=DrawOcclusion,ExperimentalProductivityFeatures,FontCacheScaling,InfiniteSessionRestore,LayeredAPI,NetworkService,OverlayScrollbar,OverlayScrollbarFlashAfterAnyScrollUpdate,OverlayScrollbarFlashWhenMouseEnter,PageAlmostIdle,ProactiveTabFreezeAndDiscard,SharedArrayBuffer,SiteCharacteristicsDatabase,UseSurfaceLayerForVideo,V8Orinoco,V8VmFuture,VizDisplayCompositor,VizHitTestDrawQuad,WebAssemblyBaseline,WebAssemblyThreads,WebRTC-H264WithOpenH264FFmpeg,enable-pixel-canvas-recording --flag-switches-end [1] https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm [2] https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMDVLK https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMDVLK
comboy 8y ago
Hundreds of NASA photos. Arranged in a new and unique way. Never before you had to wait so many seconds watching sliding animations to view the next picture. Am I missing something? Random link shows just a gray background under firefox then I have to wait 30 seconds to watch the initial animation again (ok, I can skip it down to 10 seconds). I don't know what did they use machine learning for. What's good about having small bubbles as links instead of a clear list of albums? I'll drink coffee just in case but I think that's not the problem here.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  This is what happens when the designer works on it for too long - imagine flipping the pages back and forth but with only lorem ipsum on them, you would optimize for the experience of sitting there and flipping the pages back and forth instead of the experience of browsing content. One big thing you have to watch out for in design is the difference in experiences between you while activating the transition animation for the 1,000,000th time versus the user seeing it for the first time.
  - laumars 8y ago
    > One big thing you have to watch out for in design is the difference in experiences between you while activating the transition animation for the 1,000,000th time versus the user seeing it for the first time. This. 100% this!! It's sometimes hard to not want to make pretty user interfaces - in fact why shouldn't we have pretty user interfaces?! But the problem I find some designers suffer from is they're so focused on an initial short term wow that they completely forget (or simply don't care?) about any longer term usage. They say first impressions count but so does long term exposure.
  - pault 8y ago
    Good designers work from the content out, not the page in.
- Angostura 8y ago
  > What's good about having small bubbles as links instead of clear list of albums? The idea is to spatially cluster related categories of image together, I believe.
AnabeeKnox 8y ago
Bad. Wait 5 seconds between clicks to see a photo with everything whizzing about the screen giving you motion sickness. It's technically slick, but the number of people who will use it actually view lots of photos is basically zero, because the user-interface is so bad. Maybe that's not the point, maybe this is just a technical demo.
- alexlrobertson 8y ago
  That initial animation induced motion sickness for me and very rarely get motion sickness from video games, VR, movies, driving, flying, etc.
AltmousGadfly 8y ago
I have not seen such lags for a long time. NASA could try better.
gleglegle 8y ago
They've obviously put a lot of work on this, but the drawn out long transitions are horrible and really take away from the images that should be the focus of the experience.
- tumetab1 8y ago
  I don't think so. It's just a cloud word with photos associated that have captions which is kind of lame. Found "Mates" which is a weird clicked on it and the related photos are when in the description the word "mates" appears, as in, "John and crew mates were picked up by a chopper". This seems to be just a AI buzzword abuse.
the_other 8y ago
Once you get past the fluff and into a gallery, it’s just a themed gallery. I habitually use screen zoom to make up for weak cision. The gallery carousel breaks, becoming inctrollable or blank once zoom (on mobile Safari) is engaged.
brudgers 8y ago
Not being able to click through the images quickly gave me temporal space to think. Slowing down and appreciating the amazing things the images depict. The teamwork, engineering, bravery that went into making the images boggled my mind once I stopped seeing them as just more lolcats. It made me conscious of the clickclickclick way I ordinarily view images. It made me uncomfortable with the way I treat the world. What more could I ask than to have my mental habits questioned and my awe of the universe brought fore.
- gundmc 8y ago
  Really appreciated reading your comment. I had a similar realization about the way I consume internet media in the past and your post brought it back into my consciousness. It really is awe-inspiring what NASA has accomplished. They are still doing amazing work, but I'm not sure anything in my lifetime will have the mystique of the first man walking on the moon.
folkrav 8y ago
Breaking news: artsy website with animations - HN doesn't like it. People over here have such a hard-on for efficiency and speed. I'll give it to you, transitions are on the long side - I wouldn't mind the transitions taking half the time they do now, or the image descriptions taking less time to darken. However, if the idea was just to be a simple image gallery they'd just give us a .zip file. It's obviously meant to be a laid back and slow experience. IMHO here it's definitely too slow, but people over here seem to hate everything that's not a blank site with 0 animations. I work back-end dev, I used to think everything flashy on the frontend was a waste of time. I then worked in a web agency, I've seen the thought process - usually, with _good_ designers and UX specialists, the overall experience is tailored to whatever feel they want the site to have. I worked on a virtual expo site with a museum once, it was _meant_ to be contemplative and slow. You guys would have immediately hated it, while if you took two seconds of your life to just let yourself be immersed, the whole thing was a great experience. People over here also love to rave how this is anti-user, but you people are misunderstanding the average user. Power users like you are the minority. Most people don't mind the animations, and a lot of them actually enjoy it.
- spectramax 8y ago
  I couldn’t disagree with you more except the complaining usually takes over the HN thread. It’s not that nerds, geeks and technology-savvy audience of HN wants something for the “power user”. It’s that we want simplicity in design. We want to get rid of decoration and get to the essence of what is being presented. Animations, fancy loaders, etc get in the way of enjoying the content. “Chill out, this is supposed to be a relaxing experience” is not the answer. It’s condescending and out of touch with reality. How can the user “Chill out” if the browser comes to a crawl, phone heats up and is confused about what is going on. Do you remember Apple’s “Cover flow” where you can scroll through album covers? This website reminds of how designers get carried away by fancy, novel ideas. It was a massive failure, everyone used album lists, it was slow as hell and Apple finally killed it in one of the recent MacOS releases. It’s not about “power users”.
  - folkrav 8y ago
    > It’s not that nerds, geeks and technology-savvy audience of HN wants something for the “power user”. It’s that we want simplicity in design. We want to get rid of decoration and get to the essence of what is being presented. Animations, fancy loaders, etc get in the way of enjoying the content. My whole point was that "decoration" can be enjoyable. > “Chill out, this is supposed to be a relaxing experience” is not the answer. It’s condescending and out of touch with reality. You haven’t put forth a compelling argument besides taking an anti-cliche stance. You're assuming all users have this stance, and that's what's actually condescending and out of touch to me. You haven't really put forward any compelling argument that doesn't fit my description of HN users assuming what they are looking for in a website is in any way representative of what the average user wants. It's the same thing as the tech crowd getting shouting at phone manufacturers because they're removing the headphone jack: surprise surprise, the average user doesn't care enough about plugging in an adapter that they won't buy the phone. > Do you remember Apple’s “Cover flow” where you can scroll through album covers? This website reminds of how designers get carried away by fancy, novel ideas. It was a massive failure, everyone used album lists, it was slow as hell and Apple finally killed it in one of the recent MacOS releases. It’s not about “power users”. Cover Flow was a failure as part of a music organisation software. This is part of Google's "Arts Experiments". It's _meant_ to be pretty and flashy.
buboard 8y ago
I expected some kind of map of the visible universe. NASA got my feelings hurt
CzarnyZiutek 8y ago
pointless forest
- dang 8y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
  - CzarnyZiutek 8y ago
    ^ "The Humorless One"
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ape4 8y ago
There's a "rust" category
gkthegr8 8y ago
The transitions are extremely annoying.
askafriend 8y ago
I really enjoyed the presentation of the content. The transitions were very cool (maybe a tad long but nothing worth complaining about in my opinion). Plus the transitions probably acted as a filler for loading time instead of having a traditional loading spinner. Really impressed with how polished, smooth, and immersive the whole experience is. How content is presented is just as important as content itself in many cases. I welcome and appreciate creative explorations like this.
- magduf 8y ago
  I usually prefer simple and efficient, but the complaints against this intentionally-artsy website really remind me of people who don't see movies as a valid art form.
nsriv 8y ago
Odd to see so much complaining when the page works beautifully on mobile.
laythea 8y ago
The bad thing about this way of presentation, is that the circle bubbles are dispersed, at any level. So I need to pan around just to read the text on each, which is very annoying.
katabasis 8y ago
I understand the UI is not to everyone's taste, but I think the idea of using machine learning to create an engaging "window" into large sets of public-domain images is a good one. It would be interesting to read more about the process used to tag and organize the content for this project. There are lots of other repositories of high-quality free content (museum archives, Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, etc) that could benefit from this kind of machine-aided presentation.

167 points by ArtWomb 8y ago

Interesting, but the site made my computer crawl almost to a halt. Computer which is used for (and good at it) advanced rendering and simulations. A 12 core machine with two modern GPUs inside. Modern Web, and chrome, is a travesty.

codydh 8y ago
Interestingly runs fine for me on Safari 12.0.3 on a midrange 2017 MacBook Pro 15".
- Angostura 8y ago
  Same here on a late 2013 bog standard 21" iMac
rrdharan 8y ago
Works fine in Safari on my four year old iPad Mini.
zamalek 8y ago
Must be something weird with your browser configuration. My phone doesn't break a sweat at 60fps.
magduf 8y ago
Works just fine on my crappy corporate Windows computer with Chrome.
espeed 8y ago
What drivers are you using? I'm running Chrome 72 at 4K on a 50" monitor via KDE Plasma and Fedora 29 on Kernel 4.20, using only an AMD Ryzen 5 2400g ASIC, and it runs just fine (so it does work on the desktop in at least that configuration). I did however manually build the latest ROCm [1] and Vulkan [2]. I would check your flags and check your settings to make sure you have the right optimizations. chrome://flags chrome://chrome-urls BTW: For whatever reason, in certain builds under some combination of settings, the times I've experienced Chrome running at a crawl, it's usually been an issue with GPU rasterization. These are the settings I have disabled (everything else is set to hardware accelerated or enabled)... chrome://gpu Out-of-process Rasterization: Disabled Hardware Protected Video Decode: Hardware accelerated Rasterization: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled Skia Deferred Display List: Disabled Skia Renderer: Disabled Surface Control: Disabled Here's my full Command Line: /usr/bin/google-chrome-stable --disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds --enable-native-gpu-memory-buffers --force-device-scale-factor=1 --enable-accelerated-video --enable-accelerated-mjpeg-decode --flag-switches-begin --enable-audio-focus --enable-experimental-web-platform-features --enable-google-branded-context-menu --enable-oop-rasterization --enable-quic --enable-zero-copy --ignore-gpu-blacklist --enable-lcd-text --load-media-router-component-extension=1 --enable-hardware-overlays=single-fullscreen,single-on-top,underlay --enable-features=DrawOcclusion,ExperimentalProductivityFeatures,FontCacheScaling,InfiniteSessionRestore,LayeredAPI,NetworkService,OverlayScrollbar,OverlayScrollbarFlashAfterAnyScrollUpdate,OverlayScrollbarFlashWhenMouseEnter,PageAlmostIdle,ProactiveTabFreezeAndDiscard,SharedArrayBuffer,SiteCharacteristicsDatabase,UseSurfaceLayerForVideo,V8Orinoco,V8VmFuture,VizDisplayCompositor,VizHitTestDrawQuad,WebAssemblyBaseline,WebAssemblyThreads,WebRTC-H264WithOpenH264FFmpeg,enable-pixel-canvas-recording --flag-switches-end [1] https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm [2] https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMDVLK https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMDVLK

comboy 8y ago

Hundreds of NASA photos. Arranged in a new and unique way. Never before you had to wait so many seconds watching sliding animations to view the next picture. Am I missing something? Random link shows just a gray background under firefox then I have to wait 30 seconds to watch the initial animation again (ok, I can skip it down to 10 seconds). I don't know what did they use machine learning for. What's good about having small bubbles as links instead of a clear list of albums? I'll drink coffee just in case but I think that's not the problem here.

whatshisface 8y ago
This is what happens when the designer works on it for too long - imagine flipping the pages back and forth but with only lorem ipsum on them, you would optimize for the experience of sitting there and flipping the pages back and forth instead of the experience of browsing content. One big thing you have to watch out for in design is the difference in experiences between you while activating the transition animation for the 1,000,000th time versus the user seeing it for the first time.
- laumars 8y ago
  > One big thing you have to watch out for in design is the difference in experiences between you while activating the transition animation for the 1,000,000th time versus the user seeing it for the first time. This. 100% this!! It's sometimes hard to not want to make pretty user interfaces - in fact why shouldn't we have pretty user interfaces?! But the problem I find some designers suffer from is they're so focused on an initial short term wow that they completely forget (or simply don't care?) about any longer term usage. They say first impressions count but so does long term exposure.
- pault 8y ago
  Good designers work from the content out, not the page in.
Angostura 8y ago
> What's good about having small bubbles as links instead of clear list of albums? The idea is to spatially cluster related categories of image together, I believe.

AnabeeKnox 8y ago

Bad. Wait 5 seconds between clicks to see a photo with everything whizzing about the screen giving you motion sickness. It's technically slick, but the number of people who will use it actually view lots of photos is basically zero, because the user-interface is so bad. Maybe that's not the point, maybe this is just a technical demo.

alexlrobertson 8y ago
That initial animation induced motion sickness for me and very rarely get motion sickness from video games, VR, movies, driving, flying, etc.

AltmousGadfly 8y ago

I have not seen such lags for a long time. NASA could try better.

gleglegle 8y ago

They've obviously put a lot of work on this, but the drawn out long transitions are horrible and really take away from the images that should be the focus of the experience.

tumetab1 8y ago
I don't think so. It's just a cloud word with photos associated that have captions which is kind of lame. Found "Mates" which is a weird clicked on it and the related photos are when in the description the word "mates" appears, as in, "John and crew mates were picked up by a chopper". This seems to be just a AI buzzword abuse.

the_other 8y ago

Once you get past the fluff and into a gallery, it’s just a themed gallery. I habitually use screen zoom to make up for weak cision. The gallery carousel breaks, becoming inctrollable or blank once zoom (on mobile Safari) is engaged.

brudgers 8y ago

Not being able to click through the images quickly gave me temporal space to think. Slowing down and appreciating the amazing things the images depict. The teamwork, engineering, bravery that went into making the images boggled my mind once I stopped seeing them as just more lolcats. It made me conscious of the clickclickclick way I ordinarily view images. It made me uncomfortable with the way I treat the world. What more could I ask than to have my mental habits questioned and my awe of the universe brought fore.

gundmc 8y ago
Really appreciated reading your comment. I had a similar realization about the way I consume internet media in the past and your post brought it back into my consciousness. It really is awe-inspiring what NASA has accomplished. They are still doing amazing work, but I'm not sure anything in my lifetime will have the mystique of the first man walking on the moon.

folkrav 8y ago

Breaking news: artsy website with animations - HN doesn't like it. People over here have such a hard-on for efficiency and speed. I'll give it to you, transitions are on the long side - I wouldn't mind the transitions taking half the time they do now, or the image descriptions taking less time to darken. However, if the idea was just to be a simple image gallery they'd just give us a .zip file. It's obviously meant to be a laid back and slow experience. IMHO here it's definitely too slow, but people over here seem to hate everything that's not a blank site with 0 animations. I work back-end dev, I used to think everything flashy on the frontend was a waste of time. I then worked in a web agency, I've seen the thought process - usually, with _good_ designers and UX specialists, the overall experience is tailored to whatever feel they want the site to have. I worked on a virtual expo site with a museum once, it was _meant_ to be contemplative and slow. You guys would have immediately hated it, while if you took two seconds of your life to just let yourself be immersed, the whole thing was a great experience. People over here also love to rave how this is anti-user, but you people are misunderstanding the average user. Power users like you are the minority. Most people don't mind the animations, and a lot of them actually enjoy it.

spectramax 8y ago
I couldn’t disagree with you more except the complaining usually takes over the HN thread. It’s not that nerds, geeks and technology-savvy audience of HN wants something for the “power user”. It’s that we want simplicity in design. We want to get rid of decoration and get to the essence of what is being presented. Animations, fancy loaders, etc get in the way of enjoying the content. “Chill out, this is supposed to be a relaxing experience” is not the answer. It’s condescending and out of touch with reality. How can the user “Chill out” if the browser comes to a crawl, phone heats up and is confused about what is going on. Do you remember Apple’s “Cover flow” where you can scroll through album covers? This website reminds of how designers get carried away by fancy, novel ideas. It was a massive failure, everyone used album lists, it was slow as hell and Apple finally killed it in one of the recent MacOS releases. It’s not about “power users”.
- folkrav 8y ago
  > It’s not that nerds, geeks and technology-savvy audience of HN wants something for the “power user”. It’s that we want simplicity in design. We want to get rid of decoration and get to the essence of what is being presented. Animations, fancy loaders, etc get in the way of enjoying the content. My whole point was that "decoration" can be enjoyable. > “Chill out, this is supposed to be a relaxing experience” is not the answer. It’s condescending and out of touch with reality. You haven’t put forth a compelling argument besides taking an anti-cliche stance. You're assuming all users have this stance, and that's what's actually condescending and out of touch to me. You haven't really put forward any compelling argument that doesn't fit my description of HN users assuming what they are looking for in a website is in any way representative of what the average user wants. It's the same thing as the tech crowd getting shouting at phone manufacturers because they're removing the headphone jack: surprise surprise, the average user doesn't care enough about plugging in an adapter that they won't buy the phone. > Do you remember Apple’s “Cover flow” where you can scroll through album covers? This website reminds of how designers get carried away by fancy, novel ideas. It was a massive failure, everyone used album lists, it was slow as hell and Apple finally killed it in one of the recent MacOS releases. It’s not about “power users”. Cover Flow was a failure as part of a music organisation software. This is part of Google's "Arts Experiments". It's _meant_ to be pretty and flashy.

buboard 8y ago

I expected some kind of map of the visible universe. NASA got my feelings hurt

CzarnyZiutek 8y ago

pointless forest

dang 8y ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
- CzarnyZiutek 8y ago
  ^ "The Humorless One"

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ape4 8y ago

There's a "rust" category

gkthegr8 8y ago

The transitions are extremely annoying.

askafriend 8y ago

I really enjoyed the presentation of the content. The transitions were very cool (maybe a tad long but nothing worth complaining about in my opinion). Plus the transitions probably acted as a filler for loading time instead of having a traditional loading spinner. Really impressed with how polished, smooth, and immersive the whole experience is. How content is presented is just as important as content itself in many cases. I welcome and appreciate creative explorations like this.

magduf 8y ago
I usually prefer simple and efficient, but the complaints against this intentionally-artsy website really remind me of people who don't see movies as a valid art form.

nsriv 8y ago

Odd to see so much complaining when the page works beautifully on mobile.

laythea 8y ago

The bad thing about this way of presentation, is that the circle bubbles are dispersed, at any level. So I need to pan around just to read the text on each, which is very annoying.

katabasis 8y ago

I understand the UI is not to everyone's taste, but I think the idea of using machine learning to create an engaging "window" into large sets of public-domain images is a good one. It would be interesting to read more about the process used to tag and organize the content for this project. There are lots of other repositories of high-quality free content (museum archives, Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, etc) that could benefit from this kind of machine-aided presentation.