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100k Stars Chrome visualization experiment
- mikaelsouza 5y agoThis looks pretty nice! Funny enough it seems to work better on Firefox than Chrome on my computer. I am not sure if that means Firefox is getting nicer or if Chrome is getting worse. I wonder if this is also happening to other users, specially on other OSes (I am using a mac).
- capitainenemo 5y agoDitto. Devuan Linux.
- dimgl 5y agoEvery couple of years I'm reminded of the scale of the universe and I'm just as shocked every time.
- Mondialisation 5y agoYou're only reminded of the scale the universe is not
- vermilingua 5y agoEspecially on realization that this 100k stars is only 0.0001% of the stars in our galaxy. It would take one million of these visualizations to represent the Milky Way.
- michaelchisari 5y agoAnd the Milky Way galaxy is one of trillions.
- sva_ 5y agoAnd that is only the observable universe
- irrational 5y agoI was surprised to learn recently that we can only see 5,000 stars from Earth with the naked eye.
- CSSer 5y agoIs that even in the best conditions i.e. a dark site?
- Blammar 5y agoDepends on your definition of "star." You can see the Andromeda galaxy with your naked eye (as well as the galactic center.)
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoTrue, but IIUC, that's the only object you can see in the sky that is not a part of our galaxy.
- zuminator 5y agoThe Magellanic clouds are also visible to the naked eye.
- irrational 5y agoBut you don’t see individual stars. When I have been out in the middle of nowhere and looked at the Andromeda galaxy, it just looks like a smudge. You need a telescope to really realize it is made up of many individual stars.
- ccakes 5y agoThis is a great way to spend 10mins and have your mind blown at the same time https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem....
- whiteboardr 5y agoThis here too: https://youtu.be/zR3Igc3Rhfg https://youtu.be/zR3Igc3Rhfg
- pveierland 5y agoI found this video pretty mind-blowing in presenting the scale of the universe, especially through time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA
- azth 5y agoQuite amazing really. > Indeed, in the creation of the heavens and the earth and the alternation of the day and night there are signs for people of reason. https://quran.com/3/190 https://quran.com/3/190
- belter 5y ago"Universe Size Comparison 3D": https://youtu.be/i93Z7zljQ7I https://youtu.be/i93Z7zljQ7I
- Aeolun 5y agoThis doesn’t seem to actually display 100k stars though?
- judge2020 5y agoIt should: > It shows the location of 119,617 nearby stars derived from multiple sources, including the 1989 Hipparcos mission.
- kaslai 5y ago100k probably just isn't as dense as you'd intuitively expect. As a sense of scale, 100,000 pixels is just shy of 5% of the pixels on a typical 1080p screen, so even with a radius of a few pixels per star, there will still be quite a bit of negative space given all the overlap.
- jmkim 5y agoSeems does. It shows when you click left-upper "statistics" button and zoom out. Their centre is the Sun, not the universe. All the stars here: https://stars.chromeexperiments.com/data/stars_all.json https://stars.chromeexperiments.com/data/stars_all.json
- irrational 5y agoOn my phone it took a bit for all the other stars to load beyond the local group. Maybe you didn’t wait long enough?
- judge2020 5y agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24702874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24702874
- rubyist5eva 5y agoVery cool! Reminds me of Powers of Ten: https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0 https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0
- b__d 5y agoI watch this at least once a year :)
- pdpi 5y agoTypo in the title: This is a _visualization_ experiment, not a _virtualization_ experiment. I spent way too long trying to find what was being virtualized.
- chockchocschoir 5y agoI mean, the stars in this visualization are not real, they are "virtual" in the sense that they are a digital replication of something real in our computers. You're right, it's probably a typo. But the typo at least doesn't make the title incorrect, just changes the focus a bit. Most things in our computers are "virtualized". Edit: seems people are thinking that this comment is trying to "correct" something. It's not. It was a failed attempt to bring humor to a typo that might as well not be incorrect. No need to further try to prove how socially inept I am.
- alg0rith 5y agoThe site itself says "visualization of 100,000 stars"
- chockchocschoir 5y ago
- eptcyka 5y agoYou don't need to prepend the "I mean," to the first sentence of your post, unless you're under the impression that most of your introductions will not be perceived as genuinely yours. And I don't believe that this kind of obsession with being technically correct will lead to great social outcomes.
- chockchocschoir 5y agoThe "I mean" is added to give an informal tone instead of a "Here is a correction since you are incorrect" tone. Obviously it wasn't enough. > And I don't believe that this kind of obsession with being technically correct will lead to great social outcomes. There is no such obsession. It's a joke, meant in jest. I'm confirming that parent is correct, and that I'm just being nitpicky for the sake of giving the title a meaning even if it's incorrect. Granted, in real-life social situations, it's easier to spot when people are joking, in comparison to online text-only comments. Especially when the place where you leave the comment is particularly famous for being dry.
- mahastore 5y agoGood but however I move I end up in the solar system. I would like to visit other systems in the Milky Way. Thanks!
- spartanatreyu 5y agoClick on the name of a star and it changes the origin point.
- pmontra 5y agoThe only way to change the point of view seems to click on another star. All I can do with the mouse (actually the touchpad) is rotate and zoom. It would be nice to be able to move from one star to another with arrow keys, FTL as in Star Trek.
- d23 5y agoI wasn't expecting this to freak me out as much as it did.
- dcchambers 5y agoWow, I forgot that chromeexperiments site was a thing. I remember spending hours and hours on that back in the day, amazed at what Google and other very smart people had managed to do with a web browser (when things like HTML5, Canvas, WebGL, etc were all very new).
- jay_kyburz 5y agoSeems to work fine in Firefox
- jchw 5y agoI think the original point of Chrome Experiments was showing off what the performance of Chrome and cutting edge web platform features unlocked, not showing off things that only work in Chrome. Don’t want to sound like I’m writing an advertisement for Google, but in 2009 it really was genuinely stunning how far ahead Chrome felt. (And how far behind, too, considering it did not have any kind of extensions at that point, IIRC.) Nowadays the moniker doesn’t hold a ton of meaning, since most browsers are Chromium anyways, and Firefox is quite competitive in both performance and in implementing cutting edge features…
- capitainenemo 5y agoSome of the early chrome experiments required spoofing UA to run in Firefox. HTML5Rocks which has a similar purpose used a dubious CSS hack on the book demo that only worked in Chrome.
- booi 5y agohah I was thinking "wow this is so cool, I wonder if Firefox can do this". And then I realized that I was using Firefox...
- calibas 5y agoNeat! I see it's done using three.js for 3d graphics and tween.js for animation. https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/ https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/ https://github.com/tweenjs/tween.js/ https://github.com/tweenjs/tween.js/
- ngalstyan4 5y agoMy first thought was that some VM virtualization repo got 100k stars on GitHub :))
- fulafel 5y agoThis is 10 years old. Here's the making-of post from 2012: https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/casestudies/100000stars/ https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/casestudies/100000st...
- sandos 5y agoI you want to game around in a similar setting, I can recommend Elite Dangerous. It never really shows the scale in this way due to FTL though it has a galaxy map, but it is a game where you can travel for hours (wall-clock time) in a direction and not exhaust the "map".
- charles_f 5y agoIt also works in FF, so I assume it's a browser visualization experiment?
- roansh 5y agoHow does it make you feel? The insignificance of our existence, everything that we ever did, or will ever do. There's a nice write up on building a model for the scale of universe: https://ciju.in/posts/a-play-with-universe https://ciju.in/posts/a-play-with-universe And another one on visualizing time and big numbers (not as nice:) ): https://rohitshinde.in/blog/visualizing-universe-time-relativeness https://rohitshinde.in/blog/visualizing-universe-time-relati...
- 00deadbeef 5y agoRemember, when you're feeling very small and insecure, How amazingly unlikely is your birth; And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space, 'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!
- OtomotO 5y ago> How does it make you feel? The insignificance of our existence, everything that we ever did, or will ever do. It (that knowledge that everything I will ever do is absolutely irrelevant on the grand scale of things) makes me feel more powerful than ever and let's me split the relevant stuff from the irrelevant. Instead of running after one dopamine rush and living my life at 200km/h I enjoy it more. It takes a lot of pressure away. Maybe being a stoic helps too :D
- roansh 5y agoHaha. yes, nice one. Fits in line with Albert Camus's viewpoint which puts a positive light on it, in similar fashion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQOfbObFOCw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQOfbObFOCw But I am also coming to a conclusion that we shouldn't really let the scale of universe come in way -- but if we can let it affect things positively, great, no harm. Reason being: For anything to make sense, it has to have some context (example: these words make sense to you, but not to one who doesn't know English). When we make the context (or space, or time) unfathomably larger, things we have control over lose their meaning, their impact, it literally becomes nonsense? And so we should probably keep it away. Good as a thought exercise & fun, but impractical. Now you can counter-argue saying what's "practical," but that defeats the point :)
- ricardo81 5y agoDistinctively reminds me of playing Elite as a kid.
- edg-l 5y agoIf you have ever played Elite Dangerous, you will be unimpressed by this. The stellar forge (which is a system used to generate the roughly 400 billion star systems which are present in the 1:1 scale Milky Way galaxy in Elite Dangerous) is actually something incredible: https://elite-dangerous.fandom.com/wiki/Stellar_Forge https://elite-dangerous.fandom.com/wiki/Stellar_Forge If you ever played the game and opened the map and zoomed out you know what I mean (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpZZnrwRyME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpZZnrwRyME).
- aero-glide2 5y agoSpace Engine also does something similar but takes it one level above, it has billions of galaxies too.
- Sander_Marechal 5y agoI spent a lot of time in that game exploring the galaxy before I discovered a system that nobody had discovered before. Pretty fun!
- matheusmoreira 5y agoThe community is great too. There is a group of people dedicated to rescuing players who ran out of fuel in deep space. It's impressive to me just how altruistic people can be. A shame the company ended console support.
- onion2k 5y agoIf you have ever played Elite Dangerous, you will be unimpressed by this. I've played Elite Dangerous, and I'm still impressed by this ... because this runs in a browser, at 60fps on my Macbook, with a cold start time of about 8s (and half of that is streaming in a 3MB JSON file of all the star data). That is quite impressive.
- Algent 5y agoAgreed, it work impressively well on my very average specs office laptop. It doesn't have any GPU yet it even stayed quiet.
- MrYellowP 5y agoNeat! Next stop: One Million!
- aaaaaaaaaaab 5y agoMeh, the Sun's texture has kinks at the poles.
- hashhar 5y agoWorks just as well in Firefox. Nice.
- yolo69420 5y ago
- DrBazza 5y agoWot no Pluto? Damn you Mike Brown :) And no Eris either. This makes me sad. And works fine in Firefox :D
- naugtur 5y agoFirefox Mobile on a ~4yo phone fine too
- naugtur 5y agoI made a less fancy version of that with Mozilla's A-frame VR in 2017 to check how many items a browser could render on a phone twice every frame ;) https://github.com/naugtur/aframe-point-component https://github.com/naugtur/aframe-point-component Didn't do the fancy glows and backgrounds though. This is much better looking.
- boringg 5y agoOh wow this is pretty amazing.
- davidhbolton 5y agoIt's a very neat visualisation. This is only 100,000 stars out of 200-400 billion in our galaxy. And the next level up- a flythrough 400,000 galaxies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08LBltePDZw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08LBltePDZw Now that really makes me feel insignificant.
- philsnow 5y agoI guess this is the modern equivalent of the c10k problem http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html