WebGL raytraced eye | Hacker News Reader

WebGL raytraced eye

vill.ee

190 pointsot44 comments

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Freaked me out for a second because the backing image looked a lot like my living room :P

Same here, my eyes immediately flicked up to look at my webcam's indicator light.

Freaked me out because the eyeball looks a lot like my eye ball :-)

Has some strange black flickering (screenie http://i.imgur.com/dUOSudN.png).

I'm a webgl developer and WebGL works perfectly fine otherwise (no crappy driver, no crappy GPU etc.)

Browsers: Firefox 26/27 and Chrome 32/33 (error visibile in all)

OS: Linux Ubuntu 13.04

GPU: GTX-780

Driver: nvidia 331.20

Same in Chrome 34, Ubuntu 13.10, GTX Titan, NVIDIA 331.49.

To add another datapoint: It works fine here.

Browser: Iceweasel-libre 27.0.1

OS: Parabola GNU/Linux-libre (i686)

GPU: Integrated Intel (specifically, device code 14c0:005a)

Driver: 'i915' module

I sort of suspect that it is a "crappy driver" that works fine in all common cases, but has a bug in a seldom used feature.

I'm really impressed with this (now that it has loaded).

I do have a qualm, hopefully taken as constructive criticism and not nit-picking:

The cornea and the aqueous humor are going to have different IORs and because this doesn't appear to be modeled, the iris is unrealistically distorted at sharp angles.

Otherwise, this is amazingly, disturbingly realistic. Good job.

"Requires WebGL" in Firefox Aurora.

Reload multiple times, the server seems to be hammered. I got that error 2 times, 2 times a black screen and then it worked.

    >Reload multiple times, the server seems to be hammered.

I wonder why ;)

I got the same message with IE11 too. I saw the eye without texture in Firefox & Chrome. Probably, the webserver gets hammered - the "HN effect".

It just shows that during load, I think. I saw it, then it worked (this is on Firefox Nightly).

To me seeing "requires WebGL" indicates that some sort of check has been carried out and the current browser has failed. Not really good as a loading message, IMO...

It basically requires the Web GL plugin (which is not a part of standards). Some newer versions of _some_ browsers seem to have it built in. This is called "Open Web".

WebGL is a standard: http://www.khronos.org/webgl/

It's supported in the current version of all major browsers except Safari on iOS.

YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRtvze-4R9E

Haha, very good but the cornea bulging control is pretty grim.

Playing with the settings on the left is a good way to frighten small children.

Are the colours meant to look like heatvision / crazy rainbow ?

Give it a bit, for me it eventually loaded the textures and BAM: creepy eye staring at me, sans-LSD.

While it looks impressive, i don't think 'raytraced' is the correct term - i suspect it is just rendered

"Ray traced" probably refers specifically to the shader in the lens running a tiny ray tracer to optically distort the view of the iris.

That appears to be correct if you look here: http://www.vill.ee/entry.php?17-GLSL-shading-in-WebGL

>Texture raytracing to simulate cornea refractions

Maybe it is really ray-traced. Notice that the simulation allows you to control camera focus and aperture.

looks aweomse but in a classic HN top 5 reaction... It's down.

years ago, it was known as Slashdot effect or slashdotting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect

Can we call it the HN effect?

> Can we call it the HN effect?

We can, but a more general term would be more useful.

Crowd crashed?

Crowd crashed seems like the perfect word for this.

Crowdead?

I thought that is exactly what "slashdotting" was

Why don't we just stick to the HTTP code and error message, 503 service unavailable.

It can also be called the reddit hug of death.

Also known, lovingly, as the "reddit hug"

Why doesn't GPU hardware do native path tracing now? People (well at least 1 person) is/are using general purpose GPUs to do path tracing at almost real time. If they created GPUs with cores specifically for path tracing then we could have real time path tracing as soon as that was engineered. Whoever made this brigade 3 thing, I wish nvidia or ATI would hire him. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abqAanC2NZs

> Why doesn't GPU hardware do native path tracing now?

The PowerVR guys are working on it now that they bought https://www.caustic.com/ http://www.imgtec.com/powervr/powervr_openrl_raytracing_tech...

> Whoever made this brigade 3 thing, I wish nvidia or ATI would hire him

Otoy hired him instead http://render.otoy.com/ http://raytracey.blogspot.com/

OK thanks. Then I guess I hope nVidia or AMD license it from Imagination or buy Otoy.

Please add webcam support so you can reflect the user in the eyeball.

Aaaand, it's down.

Holy crap.

Both awesome and creepy!

creepy, but awesome

Way to go! The site is down!

the site is ok !

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