Virtual Reality tour through the 21 years of NASDAQ | Hacker News Reader

Virtual Reality tour through the 21 years of NASDAQ

graphics.wsj.com

26 pointsmorisy8 comments

A fun and utterly useless gimmick. It would be nice to see some easing added to the bounce over the high points in the graph.

In case you didn't want to watch the whole thing, here is the punchline:

Today tech accounts for only 43% of the idnex, compared with 65% in March 2000 [just before the tech bubble burst]. Its P/E ratio of 22.15 is nowhere near the stratospheric levels seen 15 years.

Of course the thing with bubbles, is that everyone is always saying that we are in a bubble all the time, because to say otherwise is to look like a fool.

This is cool but I will say this is pretty close to the exact opposite kind of experience you want to do in VR. Random acceleration, particularly without having a fixed frame of reference (like a vehicle) will result in barf-city for all but the steeliest of stomachs. So fair warning :)

I wonder how they are rendering the text in WebGL like that, I couldn't figure out if they were using the write the text on canvas then extract and image and use that as a sprite / texture. It looks quite a bit smoother and scales better than my attempts using that approach.

Chronologically this is how rendering text has been typically tackled:

1. Rendering billboards from a texture atlas containing all the characters you could possibly emit (similar to your approach). Zooming results in blurriness

2. Turning the characters into a mesh on the CPU using a triangulation algorithm (such a Delaunay[1]) and pushing those straight to the GPU. Zooming results in straight lines on what should be smooth curves

3. Shaders. There are competing techniques but the differences are subtle.[2] High quality at all zoom levels

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaunay_triangulation [2]: http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch25.html

Wow thank you! This is very useful information, for now I have been going with something similar to approach 1 but have been hitting the blurriness problem you mention when zooming.

The big challenge for me is the amount of text I have to render. It's quite a bit more than just a few health points in a video game, it's heavy duty analytics information from large datasets. I get the impression from working with webgl that it's focus, historically, hasn't been directed at all towards applications like this.

Cute. That would be fun to load into a roller coaster simulator.[1] Maybe with audio of pronouncements by Alan Greenspan.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWvXJnE0f3Q

Visualization nicely done even on mobile.

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