15 ms·

100,000 stars

746 points by davex 14y ago

suyash 14y ago
that is very cool. How was the glow crated using CSS3 for the Sun?
- cleverjake 14y ago
  this is all canvas and webgl, no css
  - dtf 14y ago
    Not that I've actually checked the code yet, but the project page states "CSS3D" as one of the technologies used. http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/100000-stars/ http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/100000-stars/
- xarien 14y ago
  http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/filters.html http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/filters.html Not sure if that's what you're looking for, but it should contain the info for what is being used. I took a quick glance and it looked like it was at minimum using the following 3 svg filters: ‘feGaussianBlur’ ‘feOffset’ ‘feMerge’
dennish00a 14y ago
I need to learn 3D graphics for some of my scientific projects. Specifically, I want to rotate clouds of points just as shown here. I have no idea where to start with doing this, however. Can somebody point me to a good tutorial or other resource in 3D graphics?
- Dove 14y ago
  If you just want to rotate point clouds, it might be hard to do better than taking apart and studying a project that does that (like this one). http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/index.html http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/index.html will give you a good general background, though.
- kragen 14y ago
  I don't know of a good one, so I'll write one here. This focuses on how things work, rather than how to use existing APIs, because I've basically never used GL. What's below is short and doesn't have much math, but it should be enough to allow someone who knows linear algebra and 2-D graphics to both understand and rederive most of 3D graphics. To rotate a point cloud, you multiply each point by a rotation matrix to get the rotated point. A rotation matrix that rotates around the X-axis looks like [[1 0 0] [0 c s] [0 -s c]] where s and c are the sin and cos of the angle you want to rotate. Then you can do an orthographic projection by just dropping the Z coordinate, leaving just X and Y coordinates (which you may need to scale to your screen), or a perspective projection by dividing X and Y by Z. (Be wary of division by zero.) The usual approach is to maintain the original points unrotated and make a rotated copy of them for every frame, instead of overwriting them with a rotated version every frame, so that numerical errors don't accumulate and you can get away with single-precision floating-point. Also, conventionally, positive Z coordinates are in front of the camera and negative Z coordinates are behind it. If the above isn't sufficiently clear, there's some code I wrote to generate an ASCII-art animation of a perspective-projected point cloud (the corners of a cube) at http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/2012-April/000540.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/2012-April.... It's 15 lines of code and the only library it depends on are Python's functions to sleep for a fraction of a second, output stuff to stdout, and round to integer. EXTRAS: DISTANCE: For things that aren't points, you might be interested in how far away they are from the camera, too, like to scale them or figure out which ones are in front. That's the Z-coordinate after you rotate into camera space. TRANSFORM COMPOSITION: If you want to rotate around two axes, it's probably better to multiply the two rotation matrices together, then multiply each point by the resulting transformation matrix, rather than doing two matrix multiplies for each point. You can also scale camera space to screen coordinates this way. TRANSLATION: If you want to move the camera, you probably want to translate your points so the camera is at the origin before rotating them. If you represent your transformations as 4x4 matrices, with a possibly implicit fourth element in each point vector that is 1, you can represent translation in your transformation matrices too. MULTIPLE SEPARATELY MOVING OBJECTS: A point cloud is a single rigid object. But whether you're drawing point clouds or something more complicated, it's often interesting to be able to move multiple objects separately. The usual way is to go from two coordinate systems, camera and world, to N: camera, world, and one for each object. Each object has a transformation matrix that maps its object space into world space. You move the object by changing its transformation matrix. POLYGONS: If you're drawing polygons, straight lines are still straight lines when you rotate them, and in either perspective or orthographic projections, so you can just rotate and project the corners of the polygons into your canvas space, and then connect them with 2-D straight lines (or fill the resulting 2-D triangle). FLAT SHADING: The color resulting from ordinary illumination ("diffuse reflection") is the underlying color of the polygon, multiplied by the cosine of the angle between the normal (perpendicular) to the surface and the direction of illumination; it's easiest to compute that cosine by taking a dot-product between two unit vectors, and to compute the normal by normalizing a cross-product between two of the sides. If you have more than one lighting source, add together the colors generated by each lighting source. You probably want to treat negative cosines as zero, or you'll get negative lighting when faces are illuminated from behind. BACKFACE REMOVAL: if you're drawing a single convex object made of polygons, you can do correct hidden surface removal just by not drawing polygons whose normal points away from the camera (has a positive Z component). This is a useful optimization even if your object is more complicated, because it halves the load on the heavier-weight algorithms below. HIDDEN SURFACE REMOVAL: If your polygons don't intersect, or only intersect at their edges, you can use the "painter's algorithm" to get correctly displayed hidden surfaces by just drawing them in order from the furthest to the closest; if they do intersect, you can either cut them up so they don't intersect any more, or you can use a "Z buffer" which tells you which object is closest to the camera at each pixel --- as you draw your things, you check the Z buffer to see what's the currently closest Z coordinate at each pixel you're drawing, and if the relevant point on that object has a lower Z coordinate, you update that pixel in both the Z buffer and the canvas. SMOOTH SHADING: you can get apparently smooth surfaces out of quite rough polygon grids by storing a separate surface normal at each vertex, and then instead of coloring the whole polygon a single flat color, interpolate. You can either compute the colors at the corners of the polygons and interpolate the colors at each point you draw (Gouraud shading) or you can interpolate the normals and redo the lighting calculation for each point (Phong shading), which gives you dramatically better results if you have specular highlights. SPECULAR HIGHLIGHTS: The diffuse-illumination calculation explained in "FLAT SHADING" above is sufficient for things that aren't shiny at all. For things that are somewhat shiny, you want "specular highlights", and the usual way to do those is to do the lighting calculation a second time, but instead of directly using the cosine of the angle between the light source direction and the surface normal, you take that cosine to some power (called the "shininess" or "Phong exponent") first. The 5th power is pretty shiny. FOG: Faraway things fade exponentially. That is, you take the density of the fog (a fraction slightly less than 1) to the power of the Z coordinate of the point on the object, and multiply that by the color of the object. TEXTURE MAPPING: If you want your surfaces not to be a single solid color, you can use a raster image (called a "texture") to map colors onto the surface. You just figure out where you are on the surface (by doing a matrix multiply from your surface point into "texture space") and figure out which texture pixel ("texel") you're at, or which ones you should interpolate between. (You can also use some other function to generate the color, rather than having an explicitly stored texture. The important thing is that it maps a 3-D point in object space to a color.) This is the start of the whole universe of "shaders", which represents a big part of current 3-D work. Another application of shaders is bump mapping: BUMP MAPPING: If you're doing Phong shading, you can get apparent texture (in the usual sense: something you could feel if you could touch the object) on your surfaces without having to transform more points by simply perturbing the interpolated surface normals you're using to do your shading calculations. It's helpful if you perturb them in a deterministic way so that the texture moves with the surface.
shanelja 14y ago
This is without a doubt one of the coolest and most beautiful webgl experiments I have seen in the last few years, it actually struck a real chord with me - music, lighting, effects, the zoom and the sheer beauty of it. For those people unlucky enough to not be able to load this app (it took me quite a while) here is a particularly fantastic image I took (without asking or any right to, of course) - http://shanearmstrong.co.uk/content/cdn/the_beauty_of_the_cosmos.png http://shanearmstrong.co.uk/content/cdn/the_beauty_of_the_co... - I apologize for any slow load times.
- altrego99 14y ago
  I am guessing you have liked this too - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U Being a video it is not interactive, but definitely does strike something in me. It's almost the Total Perspective Vortex.
  - shanelja 14y ago
    Until now I had not seen this video, but thank you. This really puts in to perspective the brevity of human life and how little we have achieved so far, from leaving the primordial soup to firing Glee across our television network to entertain teenage girls and travelling to and from the moon. We are irrelevantly small and unimportant and yet we have already done the hardest thing, of what we know for sure, there are 8.5 million species on the planet and we are the only constructively intelligent one present here, there are 400 known satellites in our solar system, if you assume that every solar system in the milky way has a similar amount of planetoids on which some minor form of life could have grown, placed around 300 billion stars. I'm going to take a complete guess that only 1 in 10,000 of those contain a similar amount of life, which could be light years off, or could be spot on, or could even be far, far less tan the actual number - we simply don't know yet. The maths is breathtakingly overwhelming: (1 / ((8500000 * 400) * 300000000000)) * 10000 = 0.000000000000000098 Our significance in the Milky Way is 0.000000000000000098. We account for only 0.0000000000000098% of potential life in this galaxy. But we survived. We made it this far. From here the only way is up, or down, or left or under (depending on the location of the camera when we finally make it far enough off this rock to consider it interstellar travel.) Disclaimer: This maths was about as well as I could do at 5.30am and is the product of a Google search of the accumulated human knowledge of the last few thousand years
swang 14y ago
I am on rMBP and it hardlocked Chrome after I navigated towards the sun and clicked the information button about the sun. Worked fine until then, really cool.
chucknelson 14y ago
Wow, this is great. Reminds me of Mass Effect and its presentation of planets and their descriptions. At least this stuff is real! :)
Detrus 14y ago
MBP Chrome here, I see maybe 50 closest stars. When I zoom out, the stars in galaxy are just transparent squares. Doesn't look like http://shanearmstrong.co.uk/content/cdn/the_beauty_of_the_cosmos.png http://shanearmstrong.co.uk/content/cdn/the_beauty_of_the_co... or http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/100000-stars/img/ahZzfmNocm9tZXhwZXJpbWVudHMtaHJkchgLEg9FeHBlcmltZW50SW1hZ2UY27DmBQw/large http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/100000-stars/img/ahZ...
- owenjones 14y ago
  Same, on a Mac Mini.
ynniv 14y ago
On my MBP scrolling is backwards (swipe up moves closer), and mouse motion controls the camera offset angle. It's easy to write the code this way, but awkward and surprising during use. It's better to pretend that the hand manipulates the model, with a swipe up pushing it away and a swipe right turning the model counterclockwise around the vertical axis of the view.
- duaneb 14y ago
  Swiping up to move closer feels natural to me. Perhaps it is the other platforms that are wrong?
  - ynniv 14y ago
    It would take a proper user interaction study to find out, but I don't think that I am wrong. Imagine a photograph on a table that you want to see better (make larger). Your natural motion is to touch and pull, which is dragging down.
    - skeoh 14y ago
      I agree that scrolling should be inverted. Scrolling down moves the zoom slider on the right side of the page up which seems counter intuitive to me.
    - Domenic_S 14y ago
      Hold control on your MBP and scroll up. It zooms in. command and '+' zooms text. Scrolling down generally scrolls to the end of a page. Scrolling down here scrolls to the end of the galaxy. Hold out your hand and make the "unpinch" gesture, which enlarges photos in iOS and Android. Which direction do your scrolling fingers move?
      - ynniv 14y ago
        Hold control on your MBP and scroll up. It zooms in. This is a rare interaction, which is arguably backwards. command and '+' zooms text. Scrolling down generally scrolls to the end of a page. Scrolling down here scrolls to the end of the galaxy. Those are all logical, not physical mappings. They are not relevant here. Hold out your hand and make the "unpinch" gesture, which enlarges photos in iOS and Android. Which direction do your scrolling fingers move? Left and right? You're seriously stretching to make your argument. People pull things towards them to get a better view. They push them away to see the bigger picture. Done.
Osmium 14y ago
Eventually crashed Safari on my rMBP, but this seems to be a trend, so possibly Safari's fault (and would explain why WebGL is not enabled by default). In any case, great visualisation. Would be a perfect use for a 3D monitor.
tnash 14y ago
Was I the only one really hoping for "Reticulating Splines"?
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
  I see I'm not the only one here who was reminded of Spore when they saw this...
mratzloff 14y ago
This is incredible, and with all the positional, magnitude, and spectral information publicly available, anyone could do it. I would really love to see a search box that would allow me to jump to a specific star.
TheAmazingIdiot 14y ago
Who made that music? And do they make more from where that came from?
- davex 14y ago
  Music by Sam Hulick, whose work you may have heard in the video game, Mass Effect. The track is titled “In a Strange Land” and is used with his permission.
  - chewxy 14y ago
    Ya. This would have been perfect: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwJtYfF72Io http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwJtYfF72Io
scrumper 14y ago
It's like the galaxy map in Frontier Elite II was, in my imagination.
- tanepiper 14y ago
  This is exactly what I was thinking
equalarrow 14y ago
WOW, that is amazing. I'm always blown away by stuff like this, where you can actually get a sense of how small we all are and how distant even the closest neighbor stars are. I just close my eyes for a minute and think (or try to), what would it be like for those people that are finally able to reach, say, Vega (I know it's not the closest). Sure, this is not a big deal in sci-fi, but for reality, it's pretty mind blowing. This is 100% why I seriously want to live for a few hundred years: to have an opportunity to see the first time we actually go to the nearest star. In the meantime, I guess this will have to suffice. I also love this image that is not interactive like this, but still mind blowing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Earths_Location_in_the_Universe_(JPEG).jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Earths_Location_in_the_Uni...
- taigeair 14y ago
  yeah makes us feel small.
  - cryptoz 14y ago
    Life on Earth has existed for about 26% of the age of the Universe. Feel any bigger? (3.6 billion years / 13.75 billion years)
    - brazzy 14y ago
      Indeed that was a bit of an epiphany for me recently whe I read a site that listed major astronomical and terrestrian events in parralel. Despite knowing many of the numbers, somehow my gut feeling had always been that since Earth is so tiny in size compared to the universe at large, the same must be true about timescales.
    - scoot 14y ago
      Hmmm... but what about intelligent life? Or technologically sophisticated (relatively speaking) intelligent life. Still feeling small here.
    - elliott34 14y ago
      Then if you imagine how long the Internet has existed compared to the universe, all of this hullabaloo on HN becomes even funnier .
mey 14y ago
Warning: Scientific accuracy is not guaranteed. Please do not use this visualization for interstellar navigation.
- JoeAltmaier 14y ago
  I used to think, if kidnapped by interstellar travelers, I might be able to find my way home. Now I know I never could, not in a million years.
  - cryptoz 14y ago
    Sure you could, if you have the Pioneer map with you. Some people have it tattooed just in case. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque
- utoku 14y ago
  I agree with you. I am calling them total bullshit on the scientific part. They could at least try to put the Alpha Cassiopeiae and and Beta Cassiopeiae in the same "general" direction from the Sun. It would fool more people. Distances seem to be correct but the coordinates aren't true at all. Regardless, it looks beautiful. But it would be more beautiful if you could actually see their true locations. Without it, it is a just a game ui demo.
  - mey 14y ago
    May I suggest taking a look at http://en.spaceengine.org/ http://en.spaceengine.org/ Edit: and my apologies if I have wasted your afternoon.
    - SkyMarshal 14y ago
      Also the xplatform Celestia: http://shatters.net/celestia/ http://shatters.net/celestia/
- typpo 14y ago
  If you are interested in scientifically accurate models in webgl, you may like this asteroid simulation, which models objects in our solar system in an astronomically accurate manner: http://asterank.com/3d/ http://asterank.com/3d/
jpxxx 14y ago
Unfortunately, it looks wonky as hell on Chrome for Mac. Edit: I'm sorry for my misleading and value-free comment. Allow me to clarify: THIS EXPERIMENT LOOKS LIKE HOT BROKEN GARBAGE ON CHROME FOR MAC, A FACT WHICH MAY BE OF INTEREST TO PERHAPS HALF OF THE HACKER NEWS READERSHIP WHO WILL MOST LIKELY EXPERIENCE THE SAME VISUAL CORRUPTION AT VARIOUS VIEW LEVELS. SOME MAY VIEW THIS AS UNFORTUNATE, AS THE INTENDED EXPERIENCE IS A WORTHY ONE THAT EXERCISES A NUMBER OF CUTTING EDGE WEB PRESENTATION TECHNIQUES THAT ARE LIKELY TO GAIN SIGNIFICANT TRACTION IN THE NEAR FUTURE.
- daeken 14y ago
  I'm guessing for your edit that you feel you're being downvoted for a negative comment about a cool demo. However, you're being downvoted for not giving any actionable information, or even a screenshot; you're not making it possible for the author to make the project better, you're just making a valueless comment (and making it worse with your edit).
  - jpxxx 14y ago
    TinyGrab is down again, I have a headache, etc. And I felt this thread is a bit more interesting with an hand-crafted ALL-CAPS punching bag. :) Ever at your service! -JPXXX
- mey 14y ago
  I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you have an Intel or nvidia chip set in your mac. See http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=159275 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=159275 (which references http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137303 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137303 but we can't see) There is a security issue in the OSX drivers for certain chipsets, and AA is broken. Google Chrome has taken the step to disable AA on these systems to prevent an exploit of the OS.
  - jpxxx 14y ago
    Sounds right, good sleuthing, thank you. This machine has an Intel 3000. The stars appear properly placed, but instead of a point there's an effect-ruining translucent square around each one. The single-pixel distance lines also look wrong during transitions. Since this mystery ends in a Radar ticket about GPU drivers, I won't hold my breath for a fix. As far as Apple is concerned, it ain't broke until Final Cut is broke.
comex 14y ago
This is what EVE Online's map ought to look like. :) Works fine in Safari.
secondForty 14y ago
This is REALLY COOL! Could someone explain how this is built or give an overview of how it works? In the 'about' page http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/100000-stars/ http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/100000-stars/ it says WebGL and CSS3D, but I'm wondering how they fit together and what does what. Is there a better way to view the source than just 'view source' in chrome? I know a number of programming languages and I'd like to learn more about how this project works. [Saw the link to book on graphic programming in other comments below http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/index.html http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/index.html, but how to "take apart and study" this project? ] Kudos to anyone who can point me in the right direction. Thanks!
- krsunny 14y ago
  https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/ https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/ - That should get you going. Download that and take a look at all the examples and how they are made. Here is a good book on webgl too - http://www.amazon.com/WebGL-Up-Running-Tony-Parisi/dp/144932357X/ http://www.amazon.com/WebGL-Up-Running-Tony-Parisi/dp/144932...
  - secondForty 14y ago
    Tanks Krsunny! Really helps to have some advice on what's current and where to start.
epsylon 14y ago
Absolutely amazing. By the way, it also works on Firefox. (Though performance isn't... stellar)
- narag 14y ago
  FF 16.0.2 on Windows 7 64 here... it works smoothly, but that's no surprise, this machine is very powerful. The page is so beautiful! Until now I've never felt the need to say this: wish I could upvote it more :-)
tluyben2 14y ago
What was this optimized with? Closure?
rogerbinns 14y ago
Here is a great Youtube video showing the sizes of objects starting with the moon and working its way up to the largest known star. (Our Sun is a rounding error at that point!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEheh1BH34Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEheh1BH34Q - if youtube refuses to play because of audio try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKTu6B4Rgek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKTu6B4Rgek Here is another one showing an animation of asteroids discovered in our solar system from 1980 to 2011. It starts off pretty tame, and by the end gets scary! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONUSP23cmAE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONUSP23cmAE
ajross 14y ago
Amusingly for a "Chrome Experiment" it refuses to run on my chrome (Chrome 23 on Fedora 17 with Ivy Bridge graphics). Firefox on the same machine works flawlessly.
malbs 14y ago
Nothing interesting to add except it was an enjoyable way to start the day, thanks. Always good to have something remind you how insignificant you are! The music was great too edit: loaded it in chrome instead, even better (should have been obvious given it's located on chromeexperiments.com)
xvolter 14y ago
This is amazing. Now to figure out how to make this my desktop background...
pardner 14y ago
It's a small world after all.
ronyeh 14y ago
Beautiful. Someone needs to make a turn-based strategy game out of this visualization.
TeMPOraL 14y ago
I love the way they made the stars - from close a sun actually looks like a pile of hot, glowing, boiling gas, and not like cold orange sphere you can see pretty much everywhere else.
Roybatty 14y ago
I have my first child coming in a couple weeks and this is the type of stuff that I'm going to love showing she or he. Awesome
astrobiased 14y ago
Awesome! The only issue is that the visualization makes it look like we are in a cluster of stars. That is not correct. We're part of the diffuse field star population in the Milky Way.
TomGullen 14y ago
That is incredible, wasn't expecting much.
esusatyo 14y ago
As cool as this is, if you have an iPad check out Star Walk. It's really really cool, and if you hold your iPad up to the sky it'd show you what the sky would look like if there isn't any pollutions.
codyromano 14y ago
Small typo: should be "farthest man-made object" instead of "furthest." Otherwise, awesome job.
tydok 14y ago
"There's a lot of space out there to get lost in."
hayksaakian 14y ago
Aaaaaaaaaand chrome mobile fails once again. What's the point of chrome mobile if it's never updated? The stock aosp browser has seen more updates than Google's own browser. The only feature of this god damn browser is idiocy. /rage
sonabinu 14y ago
Thumbs up!!!!
Jarihd 14y ago
wow, awesome visualization. I always wondered how scientist determine the position of earth in our galaxy and the center of the galaxy. can somebody throw some light on this ???
mamu95 14y ago
If your interested in simulating the physics of the universe checkout Universe Sandbox http://universesandbox.com/ http://universesandbox.com/
juanre 14y ago
For those of you interested in the topic, the best publicly available database I've found is http://www.astronexus.com/node/34 http://www.astronexus.com/node/34, and The Book for astronomical computation is Astronomical Algorithms, by Jean Meeus, http://www.willbell.com/math/mc1.HTM http://www.willbell.com/math/mc1.HTM (Shameless plug: I used both to implement the Common Lisp sky renderization engine for my startup, http://greaterskies.com http://greaterskies.com, that makes pretty personalized posters out of thousands of stars)
gerhardi 14y ago
I wonder if there are clusters where distance between neighbouring stars are much less than with Sun and Proxima Centauri. Would these locations provide better opportunities for space faring civilizations to reach other star systems?
- nyrath 14y ago
  I'm no expert but I think the answer is "No", due to other problems. Distances are closer in Globular Clusters. Alas, those are "metal poor", so the only planets are gas giants like Jupiter. Distances are closer in Open Galactic Clusters like the Pleiades. Unfortunately those cluster tend to disperse. By the time a space faring civilization has evolved, the stars are no longer close. Distances are closer in the Galactic Core. Unfortunately that is a high radiation environment due to Sagitarius A* (the mega-black hole at the center of the galaxy_ and all the nebulae the hole is dragging in. Short answer: places where the distance between stars is closer are unlikely to have space faring civilizations. Of course there is always Zeta Reticuli A and B.
roundfounder 14y ago
a. this is so beautiful and well done... what we've come to expect of Chrome Experiments. b. If you haven't already, Toggle the spectral index... so sick
nixygirl 14y ago
If the universe is so big, why can't we all just be happy and live forever?
tudorw 14y ago
OMG, someone pinch me, nexus 10 was born for this :)
suyash 14y ago
slow as hell while loading up but in the end worth it
shn 14y ago
67:2 [He] who created death and life to test you [as to] which of you is best in deed - and He is the Exalted in Might, the Forgiving - 67:3 [And] who created seven heavens in layers. You do not see in the creation of the Most Merciful any inconsistency. So return [your] vision [to the sky]; do you see any breaks? 67:4 Then return [your] vision twice again. [Your] vision will return to you humbled while it is fatigued.

100,000 stars

746 points by davex 14y ago

suyash 14y ago

that is very cool. How was the glow crated using CSS3 for the Sun?

cleverjake 14y ago
this is all canvas and webgl, no css
- dtf 14y ago
  Not that I've actually checked the code yet, but the project page states "CSS3D" as one of the technologies used. http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/100000-stars/ http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/100000-stars/
xarien 14y ago
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/filters.html http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/filters.html Not sure if that's what you're looking for, but it should contain the info for what is being used. I took a quick glance and it looked like it was at minimum using the following 3 svg filters: ‘feGaussianBlur’ ‘feOffset’ ‘feMerge’

dennish00a 14y ago

I need to learn 3D graphics for some of my scientific projects. Specifically, I want to rotate clouds of points just as shown here. I have no idea where to start with doing this, however. Can somebody point me to a good tutorial or other resource in 3D graphics?

Dove 14y ago
If you just want to rotate point clouds, it might be hard to do better than taking apart and studying a project that does that (like this one). http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/index.html http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/index.html will give you a good general background, though.
kragen 14y ago
I don't know of a good one, so I'll write one here. This focuses on how things work, rather than how to use existing APIs, because I've basically never used GL. What's below is short and doesn't have much math, but it should be enough to allow someone who knows linear algebra and 2-D graphics to both understand and rederive most of 3D graphics. To rotate a point cloud, you multiply each point by a rotation matrix to get the rotated point. A rotation matrix that rotates around the X-axis looks like [[1 0 0] [0 c s] [0 -s c]] where s and c are the sin and cos of the angle you want to rotate. Then you can do an orthographic projection by just dropping the Z coordinate, leaving just X and Y coordinates (which you may need to scale to your screen), or a perspective projection by dividing X and Y by Z. (Be wary of division by zero.) The usual approach is to maintain the original points unrotated and make a rotated copy of them for every frame, instead of overwriting them with a rotated version every frame, so that numerical errors don't accumulate and you can get away with single-precision floating-point. Also, conventionally, positive Z coordinates are in front of the camera and negative Z coordinates are behind it. If the above isn't sufficiently clear, there's some code I wrote to generate an ASCII-art animation of a perspective-projected point cloud (the corners of a cube) at http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/2012-April/000540.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/2012-April.... It's 15 lines of code and the only library it depends on are Python's functions to sleep for a fraction of a second, output stuff to stdout, and round to integer. EXTRAS: DISTANCE: For things that aren't points, you might be interested in how far away they are from the camera, too, like to scale them or figure out which ones are in front. That's the Z-coordinate after you rotate into camera space. TRANSFORM COMPOSITION: If you want to rotate around two axes, it's probably better to multiply the two rotation matrices together, then multiply each point by the resulting transformation matrix, rather than doing two matrix multiplies for each point. You can also scale camera space to screen coordinates this way. TRANSLATION: If you want to move the camera, you probably want to translate your points so the camera is at the origin before rotating them. If you represent your transformations as 4x4 matrices, with a possibly implicit fourth element in each point vector that is 1, you can represent translation in your transformation matrices too. MULTIPLE SEPARATELY MOVING OBJECTS: A point cloud is a single rigid object. But whether you're drawing point clouds or something more complicated, it's often interesting to be able to move multiple objects separately. The usual way is to go from two coordinate systems, camera and world, to N: camera, world, and one for each object. Each object has a transformation matrix that maps its object space into world space. You move the object by changing its transformation matrix. POLYGONS: If you're drawing polygons, straight lines are still straight lines when you rotate them, and in either perspective or orthographic projections, so you can just rotate and project the corners of the polygons into your canvas space, and then connect them with 2-D straight lines (or fill the resulting 2-D triangle). FLAT SHADING: The color resulting from ordinary illumination ("diffuse reflection") is the underlying color of the polygon, multiplied by the cosine of the angle between the normal (perpendicular) to the surface and the direction of illumination; it's easiest to compute that cosine by taking a dot-product between two unit vectors, and to compute the normal by normalizing a cross-product between two of the sides. If you have more than one lighting source, add together the colors generated by each lighting source. You probably want to treat negative cosines as zero, or you'll get negative lighting when faces are illuminated from behind. BACKFACE REMOVAL: if you're drawing a single convex object made of polygons, you can do correct hidden surface removal just by not drawing polygons whose normal points away from the camera (has a positive Z component). This is a useful optimization even if your object is more complicated, because it halves the load on the heavier-weight algorithms below. HIDDEN SURFACE REMOVAL: If your polygons don't intersect, or only intersect at their edges, you can use the "painter's algorithm" to get correctly displayed hidden surfaces by just drawing them in order from the furthest to the closest; if they do intersect, you can either cut them up so they don't intersect any more, or you can use a "Z buffer" which tells you which object is closest to the camera at each pixel --- as you draw your things, you check the Z buffer to see what's the currently closest Z coordinate at each pixel you're drawing, and if the relevant point on that object has a lower Z coordinate, you update that pixel in both the Z buffer and the canvas. SMOOTH SHADING: you can get apparently smooth surfaces out of quite rough polygon grids by storing a separate surface normal at each vertex, and then instead of coloring the whole polygon a single flat color, interpolate. You can either compute the colors at the corners of the polygons and interpolate the colors at each point you draw (Gouraud shading) or you can interpolate the normals and redo the lighting calculation for each point (Phong shading), which gives you dramatically better results if you have specular highlights. SPECULAR HIGHLIGHTS: The diffuse-illumination calculation explained in "FLAT SHADING" above is sufficient for things that aren't shiny at all. For things that are somewhat shiny, you want "specular highlights", and the usual way to do those is to do the lighting calculation a second time, but instead of directly using the cosine of the angle between the light source direction and the surface normal, you take that cosine to some power (called the "shininess" or "Phong exponent") first. The 5th power is pretty shiny. FOG: Faraway things fade exponentially. That is, you take the density of the fog (a fraction slightly less than 1) to the power of the Z coordinate of the point on the object, and multiply that by the color of the object. TEXTURE MAPPING: If you want your surfaces not to be a single solid color, you can use a raster image (called a "texture") to map colors onto the surface. You just figure out where you are on the surface (by doing a matrix multiply from your surface point into "texture space") and figure out which texture pixel ("texel") you're at, or which ones you should interpolate between. (You can also use some other function to generate the color, rather than having an explicitly stored texture. The important thing is that it maps a 3-D point in object space to a color.) This is the start of the whole universe of "shaders", which represents a big part of current 3-D work. Another application of shaders is bump mapping: BUMP MAPPING: If you're doing Phong shading, you can get apparent texture (in the usual sense: something you could feel if you could touch the object) on your surfaces without having to transform more points by simply perturbing the interpolated surface normals you're using to do your shading calculations. It's helpful if you perturb them in a deterministic way so that the texture moves with the surface.

shanelja 14y ago

This is without a doubt one of the coolest and most beautiful webgl experiments I have seen in the last few years, it actually struck a real chord with me - music, lighting, effects, the zoom and the sheer beauty of it. For those people unlucky enough to not be able to load this app (it took me quite a while) here is a particularly fantastic image I took (without asking or any right to, of course) - http://shanearmstrong.co.uk/content/cdn/the_beauty_of_the_cosmos.png http://shanearmstrong.co.uk/content/cdn/the_beauty_of_the_co... - I apologize for any slow load times.

altrego99 14y ago
I am guessing you have liked this too - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U Being a video it is not interactive, but definitely does strike something in me. It's almost the Total Perspective Vortex.
- shanelja 14y ago
  Until now I had not seen this video, but thank you. This really puts in to perspective the brevity of human life and how little we have achieved so far, from leaving the primordial soup to firing Glee across our television network to entertain teenage girls and travelling to and from the moon. We are irrelevantly small and unimportant and yet we have already done the hardest thing, of what we know for sure, there are 8.5 million species on the planet and we are the only constructively intelligent one present here, there are 400 known satellites in our solar system, if you assume that every solar system in the milky way has a similar amount of planetoids on which some minor form of life could have grown, placed around 300 billion stars. I'm going to take a complete guess that only 1 in 10,000 of those contain a similar amount of life, which could be light years off, or could be spot on, or could even be far, far less tan the actual number - we simply don't know yet. The maths is breathtakingly overwhelming: (1 / ((8500000 * 400) * 300000000000)) * 10000 = 0.000000000000000098 Our significance in the Milky Way is 0.000000000000000098. We account for only 0.0000000000000098% of potential life in this galaxy. But we survived. We made it this far. From here the only way is up, or down, or left or under (depending on the location of the camera when we finally make it far enough off this rock to consider it interstellar travel.) Disclaimer: This maths was about as well as I could do at 5.30am and is the product of a Google search of the accumulated human knowledge of the last few thousand years

swang 14y ago

I am on rMBP and it hardlocked Chrome after I navigated towards the sun and clicked the information button about the sun. Worked fine until then, really cool.

chucknelson 14y ago

Wow, this is great. Reminds me of Mass Effect and its presentation of planets and their descriptions. At least this stuff is real! :)

Detrus 14y ago

MBP Chrome here, I see maybe 50 closest stars. When I zoom out, the stars in galaxy are just transparent squares. Doesn't look like http://shanearmstrong.co.uk/content/cdn/the_beauty_of_the_cosmos.png http://shanearmstrong.co.uk/content/cdn/the_beauty_of_the_co... or http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/100000-stars/img/ahZzfmNocm9tZXhwZXJpbWVudHMtaHJkchgLEg9FeHBlcmltZW50SW1hZ2UY27DmBQw/large http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/100000-stars/img/ahZ...

owenjones 14y ago
Same, on a Mac Mini.

ynniv 14y ago

On my MBP scrolling is backwards (swipe up moves closer), and mouse motion controls the camera offset angle. It's easy to write the code this way, but awkward and surprising during use. It's better to pretend that the hand manipulates the model, with a swipe up pushing it away and a swipe right turning the model counterclockwise around the vertical axis of the view.

duaneb 14y ago
Swiping up to move closer feels natural to me. Perhaps it is the other platforms that are wrong?
- ynniv 14y ago
  It would take a proper user interaction study to find out, but I don't think that I am wrong. Imagine a photograph on a table that you want to see better (make larger). Your natural motion is to touch and pull, which is dragging down.
  - skeoh 14y ago
    I agree that scrolling should be inverted. Scrolling down moves the zoom slider on the right side of the page up which seems counter intuitive to me.
  - Domenic_S 14y ago
    Hold control on your MBP and scroll up. It zooms in. command and '+' zooms text. Scrolling down generally scrolls to the end of a page. Scrolling down here scrolls to the end of the galaxy. Hold out your hand and make the "unpinch" gesture, which enlarges photos in iOS and Android. Which direction do your scrolling fingers move?
    - ynniv 14y ago
      Hold control on your MBP and scroll up. It zooms in. This is a rare interaction, which is arguably backwards. command and '+' zooms text. Scrolling down generally scrolls to the end of a page. Scrolling down here scrolls to the end of the galaxy. Those are all logical, not physical mappings. They are not relevant here. Hold out your hand and make the "unpinch" gesture, which enlarges photos in iOS and Android. Which direction do your scrolling fingers move? Left and right? You're seriously stretching to make your argument. People pull things towards them to get a better view. They push them away to see the bigger picture. Done.

Osmium 14y ago

Eventually crashed Safari on my rMBP, but this seems to be a trend, so possibly Safari's fault (and would explain why WebGL is not enabled by default). In any case, great visualisation. Would be a perfect use for a 3D monitor.

tnash 14y ago

Was I the only one really hoping for "Reticulating Splines"?

TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
I see I'm not the only one here who was reminded of Spore when they saw this...

mratzloff 14y ago

This is incredible, and with all the positional, magnitude, and spectral information publicly available, anyone could do it. I would really love to see a search box that would allow me to jump to a specific star.

TheAmazingIdiot 14y ago

Who made that music? And do they make more from where that came from?

davex 14y ago
Music by Sam Hulick, whose work you may have heard in the video game, Mass Effect. The track is titled “In a Strange Land” and is used with his permission.
- chewxy 14y ago
  Ya. This would have been perfect: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwJtYfF72Io http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwJtYfF72Io

scrumper 14y ago

It's like the galaxy map in Frontier Elite II was, in my imagination.

tanepiper 14y ago
This is exactly what I was thinking

equalarrow 14y ago

WOW, that is amazing. I'm always blown away by stuff like this, where you can actually get a sense of how small we all are and how distant even the closest neighbor stars are. I just close my eyes for a minute and think (or try to), what would it be like for those people that are finally able to reach, say, Vega (I know it's not the closest). Sure, this is not a big deal in sci-fi, but for reality, it's pretty mind blowing. This is 100% why I seriously want to live for a few hundred years: to have an opportunity to see the first time we actually go to the nearest star. In the meantime, I guess this will have to suffice. I also love this image that is not interactive like this, but still mind blowing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Earths_Location_in_the_Universe_(JPEG).jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Earths_Location_in_the_Uni...

taigeair 14y ago
yeah makes us feel small.
- cryptoz 14y ago
  Life on Earth has existed for about 26% of the age of the Universe. Feel any bigger? (3.6 billion years / 13.75 billion years)
  - brazzy 14y ago
    Indeed that was a bit of an epiphany for me recently whe I read a site that listed major astronomical and terrestrian events in parralel. Despite knowing many of the numbers, somehow my gut feeling had always been that since Earth is so tiny in size compared to the universe at large, the same must be true about timescales.
  - scoot 14y ago
    Hmmm... but what about intelligent life? Or technologically sophisticated (relatively speaking) intelligent life. Still feeling small here.
  - elliott34 14y ago
    Then if you imagine how long the Internet has existed compared to the universe, all of this hullabaloo on HN becomes even funnier .

mey 14y ago

Warning: Scientific accuracy is not guaranteed. Please do not use this visualization for interstellar navigation.

JoeAltmaier 14y ago
I used to think, if kidnapped by interstellar travelers, I might be able to find my way home. Now I know I never could, not in a million years.
- cryptoz 14y ago
  Sure you could, if you have the Pioneer map with you. Some people have it tattooed just in case. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque
utoku 14y ago
I agree with you. I am calling them total bullshit on the scientific part. They could at least try to put the Alpha Cassiopeiae and and Beta Cassiopeiae in the same "general" direction from the Sun. It would fool more people. Distances seem to be correct but the coordinates aren't true at all. Regardless, it looks beautiful. But it would be more beautiful if you could actually see their true locations. Without it, it is a just a game ui demo.
- mey 14y ago
  May I suggest taking a look at http://en.spaceengine.org/ http://en.spaceengine.org/ Edit: and my apologies if I have wasted your afternoon.
  - SkyMarshal 14y ago
    Also the xplatform Celestia: http://shatters.net/celestia/ http://shatters.net/celestia/
typpo 14y ago
If you are interested in scientifically accurate models in webgl, you may like this asteroid simulation, which models objects in our solar system in an astronomically accurate manner: http://asterank.com/3d/ http://asterank.com/3d/

jpxxx 14y ago

Unfortunately, it looks wonky as hell on Chrome for Mac. Edit: I'm sorry for my misleading and value-free comment. Allow me to clarify: THIS EXPERIMENT LOOKS LIKE HOT BROKEN GARBAGE ON CHROME FOR MAC, A FACT WHICH MAY BE OF INTEREST TO PERHAPS HALF OF THE HACKER NEWS READERSHIP WHO WILL MOST LIKELY EXPERIENCE THE SAME VISUAL CORRUPTION AT VARIOUS VIEW LEVELS. SOME MAY VIEW THIS AS UNFORTUNATE, AS THE INTENDED EXPERIENCE IS A WORTHY ONE THAT EXERCISES A NUMBER OF CUTTING EDGE WEB PRESENTATION TECHNIQUES THAT ARE LIKELY TO GAIN SIGNIFICANT TRACTION IN THE NEAR FUTURE.

daeken 14y ago
I'm guessing for your edit that you feel you're being downvoted for a negative comment about a cool demo. However, you're being downvoted for not giving any actionable information, or even a screenshot; you're not making it possible for the author to make the project better, you're just making a valueless comment (and making it worse with your edit).
- jpxxx 14y ago
  TinyGrab is down again, I have a headache, etc. And I felt this thread is a bit more interesting with an hand-crafted ALL-CAPS punching bag. :) Ever at your service! -JPXXX
mey 14y ago
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you have an Intel or nvidia chip set in your mac. See http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=159275 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=159275 (which references http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137303 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137303 but we can't see) There is a security issue in the OSX drivers for certain chipsets, and AA is broken. Google Chrome has taken the step to disable AA on these systems to prevent an exploit of the OS.
- jpxxx 14y ago
  Sounds right, good sleuthing, thank you. This machine has an Intel 3000. The stars appear properly placed, but instead of a point there's an effect-ruining translucent square around each one. The single-pixel distance lines also look wrong during transitions. Since this mystery ends in a Radar ticket about GPU drivers, I won't hold my breath for a fix. As far as Apple is concerned, it ain't broke until Final Cut is broke.

comex 14y ago

This is what EVE Online's map ought to look like. :) Works fine in Safari.

secondForty 14y ago

This is REALLY COOL! Could someone explain how this is built or give an overview of how it works? In the 'about' page http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/100000-stars/ http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/100000-stars/ it says WebGL and CSS3D, but I'm wondering how they fit together and what does what. Is there a better way to view the source than just 'view source' in chrome? I know a number of programming languages and I'd like to learn more about how this project works. [Saw the link to book on graphic programming in other comments below http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/index.html http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/index.html, but how to "take apart and study" this project? ] Kudos to anyone who can point me in the right direction. Thanks!

krsunny 14y ago
https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/ https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/ - That should get you going. Download that and take a look at all the examples and how they are made. Here is a good book on webgl too - http://www.amazon.com/WebGL-Up-Running-Tony-Parisi/dp/144932357X/ http://www.amazon.com/WebGL-Up-Running-Tony-Parisi/dp/144932...
- secondForty 14y ago
  Tanks Krsunny! Really helps to have some advice on what's current and where to start.

epsylon 14y ago

Absolutely amazing. By the way, it also works on Firefox. (Though performance isn't... stellar)

narag 14y ago
FF 16.0.2 on Windows 7 64 here... it works smoothly, but that's no surprise, this machine is very powerful. The page is so beautiful! Until now I've never felt the need to say this: wish I could upvote it more :-)

tluyben2 14y ago

What was this optimized with? Closure?

rogerbinns 14y ago

Here is a great Youtube video showing the sizes of objects starting with the moon and working its way up to the largest known star. (Our Sun is a rounding error at that point!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEheh1BH34Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEheh1BH34Q - if youtube refuses to play because of audio try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKTu6B4Rgek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKTu6B4Rgek Here is another one showing an animation of asteroids discovered in our solar system from 1980 to 2011. It starts off pretty tame, and by the end gets scary! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONUSP23cmAE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONUSP23cmAE

ajross 14y ago

Amusingly for a "Chrome Experiment" it refuses to run on my chrome (Chrome 23 on Fedora 17 with Ivy Bridge graphics). Firefox on the same machine works flawlessly.

malbs 14y ago

Nothing interesting to add except it was an enjoyable way to start the day, thanks. Always good to have something remind you how insignificant you are! The music was great too edit: loaded it in chrome instead, even better (should have been obvious given it's located on chromeexperiments.com)

xvolter 14y ago

This is amazing. Now to figure out how to make this my desktop background...

pardner 14y ago

It's a small world after all.

ronyeh 14y ago

Beautiful. Someone needs to make a turn-based strategy game out of this visualization.

TeMPOraL 14y ago

I love the way they made the stars - from close a sun actually looks like a pile of hot, glowing, boiling gas, and not like cold orange sphere you can see pretty much everywhere else.

Roybatty 14y ago

I have my first child coming in a couple weeks and this is the type of stuff that I'm going to love showing she or he. Awesome

astrobiased 14y ago

Awesome! The only issue is that the visualization makes it look like we are in a cluster of stars. That is not correct. We're part of the diffuse field star population in the Milky Way.

TomGullen 14y ago

That is incredible, wasn't expecting much.

esusatyo 14y ago

As cool as this is, if you have an iPad check out Star Walk. It's really really cool, and if you hold your iPad up to the sky it'd show you what the sky would look like if there isn't any pollutions.

codyromano 14y ago

Small typo: should be "farthest man-made object" instead of "furthest." Otherwise, awesome job.

tydok 14y ago

"There's a lot of space out there to get lost in."

hayksaakian 14y ago

Aaaaaaaaaand chrome mobile fails once again. What's the point of chrome mobile if it's never updated? The stock aosp browser has seen more updates than Google's own browser. The only feature of this god damn browser is idiocy. /rage

sonabinu 14y ago

Thumbs up!!!!

Jarihd 14y ago

wow, awesome visualization. I always wondered how scientist determine the position of earth in our galaxy and the center of the galaxy. can somebody throw some light on this ???

mamu95 14y ago

If your interested in simulating the physics of the universe checkout Universe Sandbox http://universesandbox.com/ http://universesandbox.com/

juanre 14y ago

For those of you interested in the topic, the best publicly available database I've found is http://www.astronexus.com/node/34 http://www.astronexus.com/node/34, and The Book for astronomical computation is Astronomical Algorithms, by Jean Meeus, http://www.willbell.com/math/mc1.HTM http://www.willbell.com/math/mc1.HTM (Shameless plug: I used both to implement the Common Lisp sky renderization engine for my startup, http://greaterskies.com http://greaterskies.com, that makes pretty personalized posters out of thousands of stars)

gerhardi 14y ago

I wonder if there are clusters where distance between neighbouring stars are much less than with Sun and Proxima Centauri. Would these locations provide better opportunities for space faring civilizations to reach other star systems?

nyrath 14y ago
I'm no expert but I think the answer is "No", due to other problems. Distances are closer in Globular Clusters. Alas, those are "metal poor", so the only planets are gas giants like Jupiter. Distances are closer in Open Galactic Clusters like the Pleiades. Unfortunately those cluster tend to disperse. By the time a space faring civilization has evolved, the stars are no longer close. Distances are closer in the Galactic Core. Unfortunately that is a high radiation environment due to Sagitarius A* (the mega-black hole at the center of the galaxy_ and all the nebulae the hole is dragging in. Short answer: places where the distance between stars is closer are unlikely to have space faring civilizations. Of course there is always Zeta Reticuli A and B.

roundfounder 14y ago

a. this is so beautiful and well done... what we've come to expect of Chrome Experiments. b. If you haven't already, Toggle the spectral index... so sick

nixygirl 14y ago

If the universe is so big, why can't we all just be happy and live forever?

tudorw 14y ago

OMG, someone pinch me, nexus 10 was born for this :)

suyash 14y ago

slow as hell while loading up but in the end worth it

shn 14y ago

67:2 [He] who created death and life to test you [as to] which of you is best in deed - and He is the Exalted in Might, the Forgiving - 67:3 [And] who created seven heavens in layers. You do not see in the creation of the Most Merciful any inconsistency. So return [your] vision [to the sky]; do you see any breaks? 67:4 Then return [your] vision twice again. [Your] vision will return to you humbled while it is fatigued.