
Virtual Reality tour through the 21 years of NASDAQ - morisy
http://graphics.wsj.com/3d-nasdaq/
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markbnj
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.

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formulaT
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.

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gfodor
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 :)

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benjaminjackman
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.

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

~~~
benjaminjackman
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.

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Animats
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWvXJnE0f3Q)

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hcrisp
Visualization nicely done even on mobile.

