3 ms·
Wait, if the technology is so simple that you can build an alternative viewer in 3 weeks, what are they selling? Is it the data format?
by StavrosK 6y ago
Wait, if the technology is so simple that you can build an alternative viewer in 3 weeks, what are they selling? Is it the data format?
- asutekku 6y agoThey’re selling it so you don’t have to get it by yourself.
- sbarre 6y ago3 weeks for a prototype 3 months for an alpha 3 quarters for a production release. You know how engineering estimates work... ;-)
- tinco 6y agoThey've got a whole bunch of features in their viewer, making a feature matching viewer would take years. The basic technology is a tree of JSON files describing what models or other JSON files to load for regions of space. So the nodes are JSON files and the leaves are 3d models basically. There's a simple algorithm that you give your current perspective (i.e. where you are in space, and what direction you're looking in) that will walk the tree and decide what models will be in your field of view and which won't be, and at what distance (which decides the level of detail). Then the last step is simply downloading those models, while at the same time evicting irrelevant 3d models from your gpu. They hand rolled an entire high performance 3D engine in Javascript, which is a big challenge in and of itself. We cheated by using WASM and a high performance programming language, making the 3D engine part trivial. Likewise, I'd be surprised if it took them more than a week or two to get their initial proof of concept working in Unreal Engine. Oh and I believe their business model is/was to sell hosting and processing for the 3D models. We've been paying them a couple hundred per month just for this service.
- StavrosK 6y agoThat's helpful, thank you!