Unlimited Detail

[VikingTechJPL]

This looks fascinating. Is it the future of Celestia?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-ATtrIm ... tube_gdata

Chris, do ATI and NVidea have anything similar?

[BobHegwood]

This looks fascinating. Is it the future of Celestia?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-ATtrIm ... tube_gdata

Chris, do ATI and NVidea have anything similar?

It may be...
When we get a 264=bit version of Celestia, and we can get a much quicker
disk access, and much quicker versions of PC's... Yes?

I am waiting with not much nreath now cause I'm getting much older,

Thanks, Brain-Dead

[chris]

This looks fascinating. Is it the future of Celestia?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-ATtrIm ... tube_gdata

Chris, do ATI and NVidea have anything similar?

By the end of the video, I was ready to punch the narrator for his smugness. I think that the technology being demonstrated here is called a 'sparse voxel octree.' It's useful for some applications, such as in medical imagery. Nvidia and ATI have created OpenGL and Direct3D based demos that do ray-tracing of voxel octrees, though their GPUs have no hardware specifically designed to accelerate it.

The video set off my BS detector. Although the narrator insinuated that he was giving a technical description of the technology, he actually failed to provide any information that would convince someone well-versed in 3D graphics that he had something new. I regard any claims about the imminent 'death of the polygon' in 3D graphics with almost as much skepticism as I have for perpetual motion machines. At best, the guy has a clever technique that will work for some data sets and some applications--notice that the scenes in the video were completely static. Polygonal representations may eventually be replaced as the dominant representation for 3D objects in computer graphics, but it will happen incrementally as shortcomings of alternate representations are gradually overcome.

I think that the 3D graphics community needs its own version of physicist John Baez's Crackpot Index:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

--Chris

[t00fri]

My God I do agree with Chris here.

This looks fascinating. Is it the future of Celestia?

Incidentally, Celestia's purpose is to visualize the Universe and thus Nature. Hence for Celestia the limitation of detail will always reside in a remaining ignorance about the secrets of Nature and NOT in the fate of polygon tesselations the narrator was smugly lecturing about...

Fridger

[VikingTechJPL]

Chris,

As you are "someone in the know", thanks for your insights.

What do you think of a "Crackpot Index" sticky here in Petit Bistro Entropy, where things like this could be moved? Or delete them altogether for that matter.

Gary

[Hungry4info]

The video set off my BS detector.

Likewise, and for the same reason.

[Chuft-Captain]

My BS detector was activated when he started by saying "he had been given 5 minutes, no more, to explain what unlimited detail was"..... and yet the video is 8:04.

[Hungry4info]

My BS detector was activated when he started by saying "he had been given 5 minutes, no more, to explain what unlimited detail was"..... and yet the video is 8:04.

Hahaha, yes I noticed that too!

[MKruer]

The technology been here for a while it is called NURBS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NURBS. The problem is that most developers avoid it like the plague because though they may understand it, find it to difficult to use (create with) or the results are not what they expect, being that from the artist side if it looks correct, it is correct and form the engineers side, just because it make look correct may not mean it is correct.

To a certain extent Celestia is already using the NURBS concept with the planets; Planets are just the mathematical formula to generate the mesh for the textures to be displayed. All you have to do to twaek the code is to make each poly smaller then a pixel and you have effectively accomplished the same thing.

Hey Chris, you know there are only 1.33*10^50 estimated atoms on the earth, that translates in to roughly a 5.1*10^16 sized box. That means that you only need a 686kB per "atom" (assuming, 3 vector dimension and 32bit color) so you only need 7.7*10^31 YottaBytes (I would have used something larger but the SI stops at yotta for now) worth a drive space. get cracking

There you go, unlimited detail providing that you have the space for it.

[MKruer]

I think that the 3D graphics community needs its own version of physicist John Baez's Crackpot Index:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

--Chris

Chris, I am up to 523 points on the system, this means I am pretty much screwed right

[Fenerit]

Hence for Celestia the limitation of detail will always reside in a remaining ignorance about the secrets of Nature and NOT in the fate of polygon tesselations the narrator was smugly lecturing about...

Fridger

Is interesting also how in declaring the end of polygons its tecnology doesn't show any example of a "polygonal" object; in the sense of a "squared" object made with its tecnology. So one can wonder whether its tecnology is able of replicate even a simple cube, and then is futile to shows all that is "not polygonal". The Sierpinsky's triangle made with demons doesn't make sense. One should see a piramid made of piramids.

[Celestial_Planets]

Guys. Technology will advance over the years. Maybe someday, humanity will look back at today's technology and say "MAN, HAVE WE ADVANCED!"
Right now, we have the Terabyte Hard Drive being sold in stores, computers that act as supercomputers. In the 1980s, supercomputers were roughly the size of today's normal computers. Who knows? Maybe someday, we will have more technological advances.

Pyramids made of Pyramids: That's something to talk about.

NOTE: This is a message from Celestial_Planets

Pyramid of Pyramids?!! HA!! This is funny!

P.S. What about a Pyramid of Planets?

I've been gone way too long, and now its time I reappear (although sporadically).

[Chuft-Captain]

In the 1980s, supercomputers were roughly the size of today's normal computers. Who knows? Maybe someday, we will have more technological advances.

You've got this a little wrong. Perhaps what you meant to say is that a desktop computer of today is the same speed or faster than a 1980s supercomputer?

In the 1980s supercomputers typically were housed in one or several cabinets the size of a refrigerator. I believe that this is pretty much still true of today's super-computers, except that there's a lot more computing power in the cabinet these days!!

Read about Moores Law here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

Read about early PC's here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_computer#1980s

Interestingly, although Moores Law has proven to be remarkably accurate over the last 30-40 years, predictions are that we are approaching a crunch point sometime in the next 5-10 years where the limits of silicon miniaturization will be reached. This is when it is no longer technically feasible or economic to miniaturize circuits (on silicon) any further.

For Moores Law to continue at the usual (or faster) rate, the chip manufacturers at some time in the near future will need to completely re-tool their factories to use new materials other than silicon. (In the interim, to buy time they will find alternative ways to optimize the computing architecture, like implementing common algorithms with logic gates rather than in software -- this is already happening).
There are a number of candidate replacement materials for silicon on the horizon, but as the factories cost billions of dollars to re-tool, the manufacturers will want to make the right choice!

[Fenerit]

Set apart the super-computers, just a workstation for game developing is already much more powerful of the common desktops, if such tecnology exist, it will be employed and tested on such machines; then knowing how the games' developing is open and fast to accept the newness, probably it should have been ready yet.

[Celestial_Planets]

I never knew we would be approaching a crunch point in the years 2015-2020. That's something new.

Something elso of note is the relationship between Hard Drive Capacity, and time. This is titled "Hard Drive Capacity over time"



Basically, since 1980, mankind has made great advancements in the amount of hard drive space. They have gotten from a 1 MB hard drive space to a 1 TB (Terabyte) hard drive space in just 30 years. Maybe in the next 10 years, computers will have petabytes of disk space.

That's all.

Celestial_Planets.

[Chuft-Captain]

I never knew we would be approaching a crunch point in the years 2015-2020. That's something new.

It's not actually new. It's been known for many years that we'd reach this point eventually, as it's based on limitations of the physics involved which has been known for a long time.

However, I wouldn't worry too much about this though if I was you....

...The reality is that a large part of the reason that Moores Law has been so uncannily accurate over the years is that the chip-makers have historically based their business model, all their forward planning, setting of targets, etc, on keeping up with Moores Law. So it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophesy because the chip business actually aims to achieve Moores Law in order to remain competitive. It's worth noting also that the prediction was made by one of the prime-movers of the industry.
( Moore himself was the head of Intel when he made this prediction, so no doubt his business plans factored into his prediction / observation. )
ie. It's no accident that Moores Law has been so accurate over time...

At the end of the day, the economics and business plans of the chip industry is predicated on keeping up with Moores Law, so by hook or by crook, whether it's new materials, or other advances, ...they'll find a way to keep up, or go out of business trying!

[Celestial_Planets]

I knew it. Moores law is the universal component of technology.

When I said it was something new, I meant it was something new to me. I never knew about it until now.

Thanks for the information, Chuft-Captain. I really appreciated it.