from Hacker News

100k Stars Chrome visualization experiment

by ajr0 on 3/30/22, 1:45 AM with 81 comments

  • by edg-l on 3/30/22, 7:05 AM

    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).

  • by ngalstyan4 on 3/30/22, 4:49 AM

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

  • by roansh on 3/30/22, 6:27 AM

    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...

  • by fulafel on 3/30/22, 4:54 AM

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

  • by dimgl on 3/30/22, 2:21 AM

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

  • by calibas on 3/30/22, 4:08 AM

    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/

  • by hashhar on 3/30/22, 8:59 AM

    Works just as well in Firefox. Nice.

  • by dcchambers on 3/30/22, 3:58 AM

    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).

  • by rubyist5eva on 3/30/22, 3:11 AM

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

  • by charles_f on 3/30/22, 6:11 AM

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

  • by jay_kyburz on 3/30/22, 4:02 AM

    Seems to work fine in Firefox

  • by mikaelsouza on 3/30/22, 3:23 PM

    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).

  • by DrBazza on 3/30/22, 11:35 AM

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

    And works fine in Firefox :D

  • by judge2020 on 3/30/22, 2:41 AM

  • by naugtur on 3/30/22, 11:41 AM

    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.

  • by davidhbolton on 3/30/22, 3:00 PM

    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.

  • by sandos on 3/30/22, 6:04 AM

    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".

  • by philsnow on 3/30/22, 4:01 PM

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

  • by d23 on 3/30/22, 3:41 AM

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

  • by mahastore on 3/30/22, 3:46 AM

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

  • by Aeolun on 3/30/22, 2:29 AM

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

  • by ricardo81 on 3/30/22, 6:33 AM

    Distinctively reminds me of playing Elite as a kid.

  • by boringg on 3/30/22, 2:36 PM

    Oh wow this is pretty amazing.

  • by MrYellowP on 3/30/22, 7:39 AM

    Neat! Next stop: One Million!

  • by aaaaaaaaaaab on 3/30/22, 8:56 AM

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

  • by pdpi on 3/30/22, 3:38 AM

    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.