Zen Photon Garden - Ray Tracing in the Browser | Hacker News Reader

Zen Photon Garden - Ray Tracing in the Browser

zenphoton.com

136 pointstsenkov45 comments

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http://zenphoton.com/#AAQAAkACAAEgcgBRAdQBNQE2AZf/AAAB4wEAAW...

http://zenphoton.com/#AAQAAkACAAEgfwAMAhwBUQJzAkT/AAACIAFWAb...

http://zenphoton.com/#AAQAAkACAAEgfwBBAowA7ALwAML/AAACjwDrAo...

The first of those was enough to crash Chrome. Caution!

it crashed many times when i was making it lol ^^

None crashed chromium on #! ... Which OS are you using?

Somehow the site by itself was enough to crash firefox instantly. I tried it 3 times in a row, it consistently crashed on open, I'm using Firefox 18.0 on Ubuntu Precise, just in case the creator of the site runs around here.

Sierpinski! http://zenphoton.com/#AAQAAkACAAEgXgB8AaYA2wJdANlWUlUCXgDZAg...

Welp, that was way better than being productive. Shame it doesn't save the exposure level in the share link.

It's supposed to save the exposure in that link, and when I click the link it does open with a non-default exposure value. Hmm!

You either die a hero...

http://zenphoton.com/#AAQAAkACAAEgfwAzAgIBhwHtAV7/AAAB7QFeAc...

Or live long enough to become the villain…

http://zenphoton.com/#AAQAAkACAAEgfwAyAiQBFQHsAQAA/wACCQEDAd...

Piecewise, type-1, Wolter optics. From a useability perspective, I'd love the ability to either draw freehand lines, or splines. Also, a button / key to constantly keep the drawn lines visible would be nice. Amazingly cool little project though. http://zenphoton.com/#AAQAAkACAAEgdwEuACQA+wBdAPsA/wAAXQD7AK...

Past the edit time, but one other one. The end of all things. Takes a few million rays to look reasonable. http://zenphoton.com/#AAQAAkACAAEgiwCfAAMBuAAoAaeCAHwAKwGnAE...

That's beautiful.

if you mousehover over "undo" you can see the lines

I realize. And I used that extensively. But if you're trying to draw lots of little links, or complex geometry, you often end up highlighting lines w/ undo, fixing a location in your head, and then trying to pick it again when they go invisible. A constant visibility option would just streamline that.

With zenphoton I really wanted to keep the user interaction model as simple as possible, since part of the 'zen' was in the drawing experience itself.

I made a more complex tool based on the same raytracing style, called High Quality Zen (HQZ). It has some support for representing curves as many small line segments with interpolated normals.

https://github.com/scanlime/zenphoton/tree/master/hqz

'Through the open door...'

http://zenphoton.com/#AAQAAkACAAEgYwAJAZgAUgF/AaH/AAABmgBSAl...

The user interface could perhaps benefit from re-using the same pseudo-random seed when you are moving the mouse pointer to draw your line.

Edit: I'll try hacking up the code.

Done. See https://github.com/scanlime/zenphoton/pull/4

Spider web hoorah. Runs surprisingly well on my ~2003 processor in Ubuntu with Firefox 14. In comparison, Gmail with hangouts is slower than this display.

http://zenphoton.com/#AAQAAkACAAEgfwBhAY0ArQE4AUz/AAACIwG0Ah...

Somewhat relatedly, after zenphoton.com I made a tool called High Quality Zen (HQZ) which uses a similar algorithm to do high quality off-line rendering. I made this video with it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obbew_7_Xo8

I was unfortunately not able to reproduce the double-slit experiment.

I tried as well. It appears that these photons don't exhibit wavelike properties.

Failed to make a laser: http://zenphoton.com/#AAQAAkACAAEgfwAFABkBCwAZATgA/wAADwErAy...

Not a laser, but I did make a parabolic reflector: http://zenphoton.com/#AAQAAkACAAEgfwAPAc4BCwHOATEA/wABygEQAd...

EDIT: this is broken. Here is fixed: http://zenphoton.com/#AAQAAkACAAEghQANAekBFwHqAS4A/wAB5wEbAf...

Two parabolic mirrors, to refocus the beam: http://zenphoton.com/#AAQAAkACAAEgXAAkAbIBEwGxASYA/wABsQEoAb...

Yep, first thing I tried was making an optical cavity.

http://zenphoton.com/#AAQAAkACAAEgqQAqAesA1wIVANUA/wACFQDVAi...

how dreamy. I love it

Reminds me of Zdzislaw Beksinski

http://zenphoton.com/#AAQAAkACAAEgfwAWAaQA5AI+AYL/AAACLwC4Aa...

Love this one! My mind sees a cave with light at the end but I'm not skilled enough to bring it to life.

Pretty cool app to be creative with too:

http://zenphoton.com/#AAQAAkACAAEgfwAEAAYBUAQAAT7/AAAAAwDiBA...

I thought about doing this but adding prisms to split the light and add colour, amazing that almost anything you can think of gets done somewhere on the internet if you wait long enough.

I made blocks http://zenphoton.com/#AAQAAkACAAEgfwAVAckBIAIYAd//AAABxgEfAU...

I love this thing... coolest art toy I've seen in months.

http://zenphoton.com/#AAQAAkACAAEgggAPAgsBJQJgAKb/AAACmQCAAi...

Amazed and Impressed that it worked in TenFourFox (17.0.7) on a G5 Mac.. and much less CPU intensive than I was expecting. Good work!

Talking about CPU intensive. Just opening the page consumes 50% of my CPU. While drawing it reached 70%.

I got the Chrome sad face.

On my machine - firefox 21 running on linux - it completely obliterates my RAM and the machine starts swapping.

Edit: tried it with a separate profile with no extensions installed. Same story. Just drawing ten walls and letting it sit there not doing anything, it's actively leaking memory. Right now, with just that page open, the firefox process has RSIZE of 450MB and VSIZE of 1.4GB.

Edit²: tried with chrome Version 29.0.1521.3 dev. Same thing.

Wow - beautiful! Thanks for sharing.

Previous thread from April: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5594351

http://bit.ly/17JXnWm

thanks for sharing. :)

"Quelques grammes de finesse dans un monde de brutes"

This is beautiful!

It would be great if people actually checked the version of IE that you are using instead of just punting to an "oh noes!" screen.

It's checking for features, not the version and browser. And as for features, UInt8ClampedArray is missing from IE (it was seemingly a late addition to Typed Arrays and might not have been picked up in time).

That being said, it appears that there is a slower alternative that works just as well, but someone would have to code up a workaround for IE in this case. I would have done it if I knew any JS (or CoffeeScript in this case).

prism?

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