Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

100k Stars Chrome visualization experiment

stars.chromeexperiments.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 84 posts

Re: 100k Stars Chrome visualization experiment

#61

Post by chockchocschoir »

eptcyka wrote: post #59
chockchocschoir wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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…

You 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.

The "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.

Re: 100k Stars Chrome visualization experiment

#62

Post by whiteboardr »

ccakes wrote: post #8
dimgl wrote: post #2

Every couple of years I'm reminded of the scale of the universe and I'm just as shocked every time.

This is a great way to spend 10mins and have your mind blown at the same time https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem....

This here too:

https://youtu.be/zR3Igc3Rhfg

Re: 100k Stars Chrome visualization experiment

#63

Post by Etherlord87 »

edg-l wrote: post #39

If 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 If you ever played the game and opened the map and zoomed out you know what I mean ( https://ww…

As far as I understand from your first link, the Stellar Forge is a system used to generate data, not display it. It generates fantasy/hypothetical star systems, it's not about displaying efficiently existing data.

Looking at your second link, the youtube video doesn't show something more impressive than the submission. At 00:10, the stars need time to load up, though it's nice that they load gradually rather than displaying a "loading" screen/message. At 00:20 you can see the density of the stars is quite sparse, the screen is mostly black, and stars seem to appear only once you stop dragging. Maybe it's an issue with the video bitrate, but it's your link and you decided 720p video is good enough to show the alleged superiority of that system. At roughly 00:30-00:40, you can see the galaxy view doesn't display ~100k stars, it displays some kind of textures of them, and that's why during the zoom in/out everything get blurred to hide that fact. At 00:40-00:50 you see stars suddenly appearing multiple times after zooming in and dragging view. At 1:30 you can see very clearly the stars are loaded in cube chunks, which rules out their sudden appearance to be an issue with low bitrate. At 02:00 you can see a loading message and a switch to a symbolic view of a star system, rather than a smooth transition to a realistic view of that star system.

So I find the submission quite impressive, and the Elite Dangerous star view less, but still also impressive.

Re: 100k Stars Chrome visualization experiment

#64

Post by Algent »

onion2k wrote: post #50
edg-l wrote: post #39

If 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 If you ever played the game and opened the map and zoomed out you know what I mean ( https://ww…

If 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.

Agreed, it work impressively well on my very average specs office laptop. It doesn't have any GPU yet it even stayed quiet.

Re: 100k Stars Chrome visualization experiment

#65

Post by pmontra »

mahastore wrote: post #15

Good but however I move I end up in the solar system. I would like to visit other systems in the Milky Way. Thanks!

The 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.

Re: 100k Stars Chrome visualization experiment

#66

Post by roansh »

imtringued wrote: post #56
roansh wrote: post #34

How 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 And another one on visualizing time and big numbers (not as nice:) ): https://rohitshinde.in/blog/visualizing-universe-time-relati...

Being all powerful and destroying the universe sounds more terrifying.

Had never thought of it this way. Where the tables turn, where we are significant, just like how we are from Earth's point of view. Agree, that is a terrifying thought.

Re: 100k Stars Chrome visualization experiment

#67

Post by roansh »

morgante wrote: post #51
roansh wrote: post #34

How 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 And another one on visualizing time and big numbers (not as nice:) ): https://rohitshinde.in/blog/visualizing-universe-time-relati...

It actually makes me feel incredibly optimistic. Nothing snaps me out of a depressive episode as effectively as contemplating the scale of the universe. On a cosmic scale, all my problems are miniscule. Everything that we as a species worry about, from petty politics to global warming, is likewise insignificant. My heart soars at the vast potential of our universe.

Same for me :) This is a good trick to get out of depressive moods

While I think this[1] holds, I can still use the scale of the universe to get myself out of bad situations

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30852360

Post reply on HN