Any one of these diagrams is the sort of thing that in one fell swoop demonstrates a principle and how something works, where a lecturer at Uni may spend twenty minutes with a couple of diagram and plenty of hand gestures and produce an inferior result. The combination of them all together makes this the sort of thing that would be a superb basis for more complete educational/training materials.
The thing is, a lecturer spends 20 minutes doodling this and can explain most of the same, especially if there is some ability to directly interact with the audience and clear up misconceptions. Maybe in the worst case a good lecturer takes twice as long to get the explanation across. If need-be, the lecturer can elaborate on any piece, or draw a completely new picture as the situation demands.
By contrast, making the fancy animated version takes 20 hours, plus another several hundred hours (or perhaps 1-2 orders of magnitude more) to build the framework underneath. Even better would be to make interactive explanations, but that would take dramatically more work than even the animated version.
If someone can spare the time to do it, it obviously has tremendous value, but each animator can only explain a tiny number of things in this medium, compared to, say writing a whole book with the same amount of effort. It’s similar to the contrast between telling hundreds of stories around the campfire or writing a novel vs. animating a few minutes of a Disney film.
Ideally we’d have ten thousand skilled animator/programmer/educators working on creating such explanations, sharing tools and ideas, coordinating effort to build more complete curricula, etc., but there’s not currently anyone paying them to do it, so today there are only a handful, working as volunteer hobbyists. There’s no incentive for current educators (say, college professors or high school teachers or textbook authors) to spend their time making this kind of thing, since it’s not an established and recognized genre yet, and a vanishingly small proportion of them have the requisite skills.
I'm not sure this material is good for a beginner. We all know this stuff, so it make for a really awesome refresher. I bet it goes a little fast for a noob though. That said, I think the approach is really cool and could be very effective.
Great job, Steven. I don't think I have ever seen anything like this before on the web. This was extremely fun to watch/read. I'll be taking a look at MathBox.js and see if I can build something fun with it as well.
Yeah, it's a bummer. I have a desktop a bit on the low-end (though I don't usually have problems), and Firefox hung on me, even the music playing in another tab started getting jerky. Didn't get to see the slides :(
Perfectly smooth here on a 2012 rMBP in Chrome, just blew through about 20% battery in 10 minutes. I guess you can't have both incredible 3D and great battery life.
Exceptional visualisations! At least for me, seeing things like the camera zooming so it's placed between the perfect-vector world and rasterised world just makes it so clear. A picture is worth a thousand words, but a visualisation like that may be worth ten thousand.
This is incredible. I've learned a lot of this before, but without the awesome slides, but this presentation makes most of it so easy to understand that it becomes obvious that that's how these problems should be approached.
It really does go to show how much of a difference presentation goes to aid learning and (more importantly) understanding.
That's beautiful. WebGL makes you realize that all the "designers" fooling around with CSS are playing in the kiddie pool.
Of course, as soon as you use WebGL, users expect the visual quality of an AAA game. What you tend to get is crap like this.[1] It's possible to get the GPU to do great things for you.[2] But that's a programming exercise. Good 3D content is expensive. Most of the WebGL demos available either have very little content, or are recycling old video games.
All this technology, already deployed, and little good content for it.
A picture might be worth a thousand words, but animation is worth a thousand pictures.
The way animation illuminates an understanding of the holistic wholeness rather than the discrete part normal education teaches, is so underutilized in education.
Heres to hoping someone soon will specialize in creating animated educational material.
I am teaching Computer Graphics for about the 15th time this fall. I have always wanted to to an animation of the GL pipeline -- I think it would explain a lot -- maybe this will inspire me to do so.
The problem, is soon as I finish, the pipeline will change, technology will switch, and it will soon be archaic. This is a huge amount of work!
This is great, I'm a complete noob and I learned a lot!
Something that I didn't understand though is how sampling rate and the justification for Apple's Retina are related (slide 31). I probably just don't know enough about either, but I'd greatly appreciate it if someone could explain. :)
Does anyone know if the author has written or presented on his workflow as he goes from idea, to concept, to rough draft, to finished product? I'd really love to learn how he goes about it... Pixel Factory was so dense and clear thinking, beautiful, intuitive. Wow.
Great presentation, although I didn't finish it because the load times between steps got to annoying (it seems like they only load when you switch to the next slide, instead of preloading at least the next one or two slides)
Yeah, my issue isn't loading times. But the need to press a button (a small button on my phone) for the next slide instead of using a swipe gesture.
It's still a great well crafted presentation. I've been given a much better understanding of some graphics concepts than I otherwise would. Will definitly come back and finish it.
Great presentation, however I must say the transition effect on texts are a bit too much. As soon as they appear I try to read them but they move around for a half second. A bit annoying
Wow this is incredible stuff. I work with shaders everyday so have an understanding of the concepts discussed, but I've never visualized them like that! Really captivating.
[+] [-] chrismorgan|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobolus|10 years ago|reply
By contrast, making the fancy animated version takes 20 hours, plus another several hundred hours (or perhaps 1-2 orders of magnitude more) to build the framework underneath. Even better would be to make interactive explanations, but that would take dramatically more work than even the animated version.
If someone can spare the time to do it, it obviously has tremendous value, but each animator can only explain a tiny number of things in this medium, compared to, say writing a whole book with the same amount of effort. It’s similar to the contrast between telling hundreds of stories around the campfire or writing a novel vs. animating a few minutes of a Disney film.
Ideally we’d have ten thousand skilled animator/programmer/educators working on creating such explanations, sharing tools and ideas, coordinating effort to build more complete curricula, etc., but there’s not currently anyone paying them to do it, so today there are only a handful, working as volunteer hobbyists. There’s no incentive for current educators (say, college professors or high school teachers or textbook authors) to spend their time making this kind of thing, since it’s not an established and recognized genre yet, and a vanishingly small proportion of them have the requisite skills.
[+] [-] phkahler|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fenomas|10 years ago|reply
http://acko.net/files/fullfrontal/fullfrontal/webglmath/onli...
(Shares some slides with the new one)
[+] [-] desuvader|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joosters|10 years ago|reply
I think it's been on HN before, It was the first WebGL site I've seen that just worked.
[+] [-] bendykstra|10 years ago|reply
Wow, yeah. I'm using an old laptop with Ubuntu. Firefox ground to a halt, crashed and then my computer spontaneously rebooted.
[+] [-] thegeomaster|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deminature|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcr0|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SSLy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aldo_MX|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sagarm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iso8859-1|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benihana|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AshleysBrain|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fredley|10 years ago|reply
It really does go to show how much of a difference presentation goes to aid learning and (more importantly) understanding.
[+] [-] Animats|10 years ago|reply
Of course, as soon as you use WebGL, users expect the visual quality of an AAA game. What you tend to get is crap like this.[1] It's possible to get the GPU to do great things for you.[2] But that's a programming exercise. Good 3D content is expensive. Most of the WebGL demos available either have very little content, or are recycling old video games.
All this technology, already deployed, and little good content for it.
[1] http://montagejs.github.io/beachplanetblog/ [2] http://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/
[+] [-] angersock|10 years ago|reply
I've worked around some really shitty canvas performance by switching to a WebGL backend, because of dumb memory leaks on IE.
[+] [-] ThomPete|10 years ago|reply
The way animation illuminates an understanding of the holistic wholeness rather than the discrete part normal education teaches, is so underutilized in education.
Heres to hoping someone soon will specialize in creating animated educational material.
[+] [-] wodenokoto|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waynecochran|10 years ago|reply
The problem, is soon as I finish, the pipeline will change, technology will switch, and it will soon be archaic. This is a huge amount of work!
I applaud the herculean effort and great result.
[+] [-] axxu|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lionhearted|10 years ago|reply
Does anyone know if the author has written or presented on his workflow as he goes from idea, to concept, to rough draft, to finished product? I'd really love to learn how he goes about it... Pixel Factory was so dense and clear thinking, beautiful, intuitive. Wow.
[+] [-] detaro|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobajeff|10 years ago|reply
It's still a great well crafted presentation. I've been given a much better understanding of some graphics concepts than I otherwise would. Will definitly come back and finish it.
[+] [-] kelsolaar|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shultays|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hacker_9|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] GaiusCoffee|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] paganel|10 years ago|reply