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Jurassic Park computer system in the browser

jurassicsystems.com

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Re: Jurassic Park computer system in the browser

#11

Post by malux85 »

Wow! This is cool.

The computers in Jurassic Park is what got me into programming when I was young. I saw their 3D weather overlay when the storm was approaching and thought "THAT IS IT!". I was 8 years old at the time.

I was determined to learn and create that system - I started learning C, so that I could open and close files. I learnt OpenGL so that I could create the 3D scene. I learnt socket programming so that I could download weather images from the NOAA.

It took me until I was 15 (I was totally self taught and it took me a while before I could learn all of the vector / matrix math myself) but I ended up building it! I made a program in C that downloaded the weather jpg, cleaned it up (removed noise, removed the NOAA logo, smoothed out the clouds) then generated a heightmap in OpenGL, and made a fly-over.

I wish I still had the code, it's sitting on my old computer at the Farm in New Zealand :<

Re: Jurassic Park computer system in the browser

#14

Post by bhouston »

SGI IRIX operating system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIX

I used that at my first programming internship at university. Even then (1999) it was a dated OS, but it was still fun it.

I wonder if they used IRIX in the movie because the VFX guys making the movie, ILM, were doing all the VFX work using Softimage on SGI machines running IRIX at the time.

Re: Jurassic Park computer system in the browser

#16

Post by famousactress »

Haha! My mom was a Sun reseller who sold them a bunch of Sparc stations for the movies and I think even wrote some shell scripts to launch some spinning 3D dino-skull scripts on startup, etc. Around this time we were a pretty rare family home with one of those boxes and an ISDN line at home as the family computer.

Re: Jurassic Park computer system in the browser

#17

Post by Aqueous »

The Jurassic Park Computer System...created and maintained by Newman. Credit where credit is due: it takes a lot of skills to keep a bunch of velociraptors pent up using a Macintosh LC II.

What always amused me is that in order to trigger the locks, the "computer whiz" girl had to navigate some sort of 3d control environment, probably the most ineffective way possible to control something that should be random access.

Re: Jurassic Park computer system in the browser

#18

Post by angelgcuartero »

I used to work with some Silicon Graphics in the 90's in a F-18 Simulator for Spanish DoD. We used C with GL (the graphic library that existed before OpenGL) and had Indigo² workstations for each developer. Origin and Onyx were used for calculation and visualization. When they offered me that job I couldn't refuse! I was like "Yes! I'm going to use the same computers that appeared in Jurassic Park!!!" :D

Re: Jurassic Park computer system in the browser

#19

Post by devopstom »

Aqueous wrote: post #17

The Jurassic Park Computer System...created and maintained by Newman. Credit where credit is due: it takes a lot of skills to keep a bunch of velociraptors pent up using a Macintosh LC II. What always amused me is that in order to trigger the locks, the "computer whiz" girl had to navigate some sort of 3d control environment, probably the most ineffective way possible to control something that should be random access…

That was IRIX's File System Navigator http://www.javipas.com/wp-content/_FSN.png

Re: Jurassic Park computer system in the browser

#20

Post by kalleboo »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #13

Really nice recreation. Why the annoying dialog repeatedly telling me not to use Safari though? It seemed to work fine for me in Safari.

Seems it shows up each time the site tries to play short audio clips. See starting line 32 in http://www.jurassicsystems.com/js/jurassicSystems.js Instead of feature detection it'll use HTML5 audio in Chrome, show an annoying dialog in Safari, and an SWF fallback for anything else.

edit: Here's the GitHub issue for it https://github.com/tojrobinson/jurassicsystems.com/issues/1

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