Spent most of the day creating a highly pretty railing in #Blender3D that... is probably too poly-heavy for #VR!
May have to either intersperse the Solar System railings with plain ones (which might look quite good...) or perhaps try using an alpha texture, if I can create a normal map from the actual 3D model 🤔 (i.e. fake it with a picture)
@elizabethtasker very cool. But I want the planets to move as you walk around the railing! It seems they are static (scared I'm missing something in all this cleverness happening here!)
@grant_h Technically, anything is possible in VR, but that might be too hard on memory and my coding to pull off in this case! I do hope to have a rotting asteroid in the central area.
I absolutely love this railing though! Understand it probably can't stay but it's so lovely. I'd love it outside my home (if I ever win the lottery, which I don't do, so... 😂😁)
@elizabethtasker Oh, very neat, but yes probably a good idea to just fake it. Possibly do just the planets as little spheres? I'm no game dev so i know zero tricks.
@elizabethtasker
Solar system design is lovely - but I can definitely sense the graphics programmers' ears twitching at all those tiny triangles!
(Exciting thing about modern GPUs - very small or thin triangles are much more expensive per-pixel than larger ones, in addition to the cost from the triangle count. For the VR game I worked on, we had a visualisation mode to highlight stuff like that...)
@elizabethtasker
Alpha-tested texture version would avoid that triangle cost - but then you hit potential antialiasing problems. (Simple alpha-testing in a forward renderer is per output pixel - i.e. no antialiasing at all, so will look rather shimmery in VR. We had a fancy alpha-to-coverage thing for such situations which looked pretty decent...)
@elizabethtasker
I'd wonder about having a transparent, etched-glass-like version of the design - keep the horizontal and vertical components of the railings as actual geometry, with glass with the curved solar system design filling the gaps. Could be nicely cheap to render...
Pleeeease keep us posted about the final product, the path to get there and the user experience during the meeting.
We have a paper coming out tomorrow (in PNAS Nexus) on the CO2 emissions of all astronomy conferences in 2019. They're immense and not sustainable in the future and as a depedency for communication of the field.
I will and yes. This started as a small product in A4E and took very long to get all data (and equally long to get it into a journal). We assessed all astro conferences and schools globally (~300 with specific data, the remaining ~60 with extrapolation).
@knud@elizabethtasker I look forward to reading this. I work in instrumentation and I am attending our main meeting (every two years) this year and it would be interesting how our sub-field (astronomical adaptive optics) fits into the bigger picture.
Right now I am about to transition to being the chair of Durham University Physics Dept's sustainability committee so would like to invite anyone on any topic connected to sustainability (VR conferences, impacts of astro research) to talk to me.
@elizabethtasker@knud 😆 Definitely then! (I will actually be in Tōkyō...well Yokohama then Tōkyō in mid-June so happy to meet for a coffee and chat if that can work then.) I think many people here aren't very familiar with V.R. potential...I am 100% not!...and it could be valuable for our work (often 3D with instruments) with remote participants.
@elizabethtasker It's scenes like these that make me wonder why we didn't optimize for cubic surfaces. Your wall would be just 4 surfaces instead, with scalable resolution, and I'm fairly certain the number of total calculations would be fewer overall. I used to read Jim Blinn's work at JPL, but I stopped before this transition happened.
@elizabethtasker cool. I am myself the cofounder of a VR company and we have the habits to create software like that. Besides, my childhood friend is the Head of Virtual Reality Training Center at ESA. That why this is the kind of content I like :D
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