100k Stars Chrome visualization experiment | Hacker News Reader

100k Stars Chrome visualization experiment

stars.chromeexperiments.com

333 pointsajr081 comments

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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpZZnrwRyME).

Space Engine also does something similar but takes it one level above, it has billions of galaxies too.

I spent a lot of time in that game exploring the galaxy before I discovered a system that nobody had discovered before. Pretty fun!

The community is great too. There is a group of people dedicated to rescuing players who ran out of fuel in deep space. It's impressive to me just how altruistic people can be.

A shame the company ended console support.

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.

I play ED and this is pretty 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.

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.

My first thought was that some VM virtualization repo got 100k stars on GitHub :))

Same here! :)

Would be something. They still have way to go stargazing-wise: https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=topic%3Avirtualization&s=...

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...

> How does it make you feel? The insignificance of our existence, everything that we ever did, or will ever do.

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

Haha. yes, nice one. Fits in line with Albert Camus's viewpoint which puts a positive light on it, in similar fashion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQOfbObFOCw

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 :)

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

Douglas Adams

RIP, Douglas. I had such fun reading the books, watching the movies.

Remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,

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!

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

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.

This is 10 years old. Here's the making-of post from 2012: https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/casestudies/100000st...

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

You're only reminded of the scale the universe is not

Especially on realization that this 100k stars is only 0.0001% of the stars in our galaxy. It would take one million of these visualizations to represent the Milky Way.

And the Milky Way galaxy is one of trillions.

And that is only the observable universe

I was surprised to learn recently that we can only see 5,000 stars from Earth with the naked eye.

Is that even in the best conditions i.e. a dark site?

Yes

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-blogs/how-many-stars-n...

Super cool! Thank you for sharing.

Depends on your definition of "star." You can see the Andromeda galaxy with your naked eye (as well as the galactic center.)

True, but IIUC, that's the only object you can see in the sky that is not a part of our galaxy.

The Magellanic clouds are also visible to the naked eye.

But you don’t see individual stars. When I have been out in the middle of nowhere and looked at the Andromeda galaxy, it just looks like a smudge. You need a telescope to really realize it is made up of many individual stars.

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

I found this video pretty mind-blowing in presenting the scale of the universe, especially through time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA

Quite amazing really.

> 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.

https://quran.com/3/190

"Universe Size Comparison 3D": https://youtu.be/i93Z7zljQ7I

Neat! I see it's done using three.js for 3d graphics and tween.js for animation.

https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/

https://github.com/tweenjs/tween.js/

How did you check the framework?? I mean is the source code accessible to you?

Hit ctrl-u to view the source and for this at least look at the included javascript.

Works just as well in Firefox. Nice.

Wow, I forgot that chromeexperiments site was a thing. I remember spending hours and hours on that back in the day, amazed at what Google and other very smart people had managed to do with a web browser (when things like HTML5, Canvas, WebGL, etc were all very new).

Very cool! Reminds me of Powers of Ten: https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0

I watch this at least once a year :)

It also works in FF, so I assume it's a browser visualization experiment?

Seems to work fine in Firefox

I think the original point of Chrome Experiments was showing off what the performance of Chrome and cutting edge web platform features unlocked, not showing off things that only work in Chrome. Don’t want to sound like I’m writing an advertisement for Google, but in 2009 it really was genuinely stunning how far ahead Chrome felt. (And how far behind, too, considering it did not have any kind of extensions at that point, IIRC.)

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…

Some of the early chrome experiments required spoofing UA to run in Firefox.

HTML5Rocks which has a similar purpose used a dubious CSS hack on the book demo that only worked in Chrome.

hah I was thinking "wow this is so cool, I wonder if Firefox can do this". And then I realized that I was using Firefox...

This looks pretty nice! Funny enough it seems to work better on Firefox than Chrome on my computer. I am not sure if that means Firefox is getting nicer or if Chrome is getting worse. I wonder if this is also happening to other users, specially on other OSes (I am using a mac).

Ditto. Devuan Linux.

Wot no Pluto? Damn you Mike Brown :) And no Eris either. This makes me sad.

And works fine in Firefox :D

Firefox Mobile on a ~4yo phone fine too

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24702874

I made a less fancy version of that with Mozilla's A-frame VR in 2017 to check how many items a browser could render on a phone twice every frame ;)

https://github.com/naugtur/aframe-point-component

Didn't do the fancy glows and backgrounds though. This is much better looking.

It's a very neat visualisation. This is only 100,000 stars out of 200-400 billion in our galaxy. And the next level up- a flythrough 400,000 galaxies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08LBltePDZw

Now that really makes me feel insignificant.

I you want to game around in a similar setting, I can recommend Elite Dangerous. It never really shows the scale in this way due to FTL though it has a galaxy map, but it is a game where you can travel for hours (wall-clock time) in a direction and not exhaust the "map".

I guess this is the modern equivalent of the c10k problem http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html

I wasn't expecting this to freak me out as much as it did.

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

Click on the name of a star and it changes the origin point.

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.

This doesn’t seem to actually display 100k stars though?

It should:

> It shows the location of 119,617 nearby stars derived from multiple sources, including the 1989 Hipparcos mission.

100k probably just isn't as dense as you'd intuitively expect. As a sense of scale, 100,000 pixels is just shy of 5% of the pixels on a typical 1080p screen, so even with a radius of a few pixels per star, there will still be quite a bit of negative space given all the overlap.

Seems does. It shows when you click left-upper "statistics" button and zoom out. Their centre is the Sun, not the universe.

All the stars here: https://stars.chromeexperiments.com/data/stars_all.json

On my phone it took a bit for all the other stars to load beyond the local group. Maybe you didn’t wait long enough?

Distinctively reminds me of playing Elite as a kid.

Oh wow this is pretty amazing.

Neat! Next stop: One Million!

Meh, the Sun's texture has kinks at the poles.

Typo in the title: This is a _visualization_ experiment, not a _virtualization_ experiment. I spent way too long trying to find what was being virtualized.

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. 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.

The site itself says "visualization of 100,000 stars"

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.

Right or wrong, I find it fascinating to watch language evolve like this and it's really apparent most in internet comments. I see so many sentences starting with "I mean" over the last couple of years where I can't remember it being commonplace before.

"For sure" is another sentence starter I've noticed, then there are terms like "on trend" which now seems to mean fashionable or popular.

I'd love to do a ngram analysis of this phenomena (?), or maybe just something simple with elastic search on Reddit comments where you can see how the use of search terms grows and evolves.

Belatedly fixed. Thanks!

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