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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpZZnrwRyME).
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.
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.
It's built in three.js and comes in at about 3MB running in a browser sandbox.
The world isn't either/or. Both can be impressive.
A shame the company ended console support.
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...
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.
While I think this[1] holds, I can still use the scale of the universe to get myself out of bad situations
Douglas Adams
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
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 :)
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!
https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem....
> 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.
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…
HTML5Rocks which has a similar purpose used a dubious CSS hack on the book demo that only worked in Chrome.
And works fine in Firefox :D
https://github.com/naugtur/aframe-point-component
Didn't do the fancy glows and backgrounds though. This is much better looking.
Now that really makes me feel insignificant.
> It shows the location of 119,617 nearby stars derived from multiple sources, including the 1989 Hipparcos mission.
All the stars here: https://stars.chromeexperiments.com/data/stars_all.json
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.
And I don't believe that this kind of obsession with being technically correct will lead to great social outcomes.
