Miscellaneous Magnificent Magnum Opuses

Today’s post is not about anything I’ve made, but some seriously breathtaking innovations done by others with/for Second Life.

We all know how Youtube is great for insomnia, so I was browsing and absorbing for hours last night, learning about a couple of technologies which have blown my mind right out of its jar.

Raytracing

If you, like me until 20 hours ago, have no idea what Raytracing is, it is basically the simulating of real life light vectors. Light, which travels in a straight line rays, bounces off of objects and either illuminates or colours the surrounding environment in any given hue. Ray tracing in computer logic is based off this concept of light reflections in straight line vectors for the purpose of determining the reflective, illuminative, and light absorbent properties of an entire scene of objects on the fly. It is to be the advent of a new age in environmental advancements.

Intel Labs is doing some flabbergasting research on this technology. Check out some excellent informational vids on their work and how it works here and here.

This Second Life raytracer is no less astounding. It uses prims to take a screenshot of prims, then a canvas also made of prims to display the captured image.
I know what you’re thinking. Wat. @__________@
Hats off to Mr. Foxular. Hell of an invention.

Parallax Shading

This confounds me beyond words.
I’ve dabbled in heightmaps in one of my game programming classes, but not enough to understand any of this. But according to the Valve dev community, it is apparently doable with some ease.
But wait there’s moar, as if your jaw wasn’t open wide enough already.
*note* Both the Shader and the Ghost videos, are inventions of one incredibly innovative Nexii Malthus, and were shot while using the Vertical Life (otherwise known as Combat Cubed) client for SL, which is built with a Script API not included in SL’s Viewer 2 which is needed to run them [I think]. VL/C3 itself is also partly [or wholly] a brainchild of Nexii.
You earn yourself a wholehearted golf clap, sir.

Ghosting

Using the API available only in VL/C3, this incredibly fascinating technology enables the user to draw an object across surfaces with apparent telekinesis (mouse positions across surfaces). This is an insanely fascinating challenge I will perhaps have to give a go at reverse engineering sometime.

Also check out Tool.Path to show this API in further use.

Realtime Full-Body Motion Streaming

Holy flapcrackers.

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~ by buddhatron on April 2, 2011.