
The Pixel Factory - bpierre
http://acko.net/files/gltalks/pixelfactory/online.html#0
======
chrismorgan
_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.

~~~
jacobolus
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.

~~~
greggman
Honestly this presentation didn't work for me. I was amazed at the spectacle
and a few things like perfect math world vs pixels and multi-sampler helped
explain a few things but over all it was all over the place and didn't seem to
get to many points or insights. It seems more like someone was asked to do a
presentation, didn't have a solid idea of what to talk about, and so threw
together a bunch of stuff until it filed their allotted time.

I'm not trying to be discouraging. A great presentation can go a long way to
making things understandable. For example this video explaining jpeg worked
for me
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2aEzeMDHMA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2aEzeMDHMA)

My point is only that fancy graphics and animation are not enough. The
presentation actually has to get it's points across. Maybe this one worked for
everyone but me but it didn't really work for me. I don't really know what to
suggest to make it better. Maybe it all made more sense live with more
talking.

There were a few "bugs" For example slide 22, bi-linear filtering, pixels
can't be 2 colors so that slide made no sense.

On the positive side I would love to know what software to use to make
presentations easy. Yea, I get the author made his own but in general, making
animation is hard work. Worse, once I've made them, even if they didn't end up
being good for explaining I put so much work into making them that I can't
justify starting over for something that works better. So, anything that would
make that process not be so much work would be amazingly helpful.

~~~
jacobolus
Try the lecture:
[http://acko.net/tv/webglmath/](http://acko.net/tv/webglmath/)

------
fenomas
See also the same author's presentation "Making WebGL Dance, or How I Learnt
to Stop Worrying and Love Linear Algebra".

[http://acko.net/files/fullfrontal/fullfrontal/webglmath/onli...](http://acko.net/files/fullfrontal/fullfrontal/webglmath/online.html)

(Shares some slides with the new one)

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desuvader
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.

~~~
joosters
If you haven't seen his website front page, it's well worth a look too:
[http://acko.net/](http://acko.net/)

I think it's been on HN before, It was the first WebGL site I've seen that
_just worked_.

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bendykstra
> Note: these slides have not (yet) been optimized for low-end GPUs or mobile.

Wow, yeah. I'm using an old laptop with Ubuntu. Firefox ground to a halt,
crashed and then my computer spontaneously rebooted.

~~~
thegeomaster
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 :(

------
AshleysBrain
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.

------
fredley
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.

------
Animats
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.

[1]
[http://montagejs.github.io/beachplanetblog/](http://montagejs.github.io/beachplanetblog/)
[2] [http://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/](http://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/)

~~~
angersock
WebGL has some other, less-flashy uses.

I've worked around some really shitty canvas performance by switching to a
WebGL backend, because of dumb memory leaks on IE.

------
ThomPete
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.

------
wodenokoto
What does this guy do for a living? Research, teach? Develop? Whatever it is,
I'm amazed he has time to make these incredible 3D presentations.

------
waynecochran
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!

I applaud the herculean effort and great result.

------
axxu
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. :)

------
lionhearted
My mind is totally blown.

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.

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detaro
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)

~~~
bobajeff
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.

------
kelsolaar
Impressive and really efficient presentation (not surprising from Steven
Wittens).

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shultays
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

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hacker_9
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.

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GaiusCoffee
Amazing! :D Learned a lot about pixels

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vikrantpogula
These slides are the best way to learn graphics! It also shows the true
potential of the web !!

------
transfire
Sigh. Running the latest Fedora on an AMD A10 with Firefox and this barely
works at all.

~~~
paganel
It blocks my latest FF on a 3-year old Mac Mini with 4GB or memory. That's not
much, but that's not ancient technology, either.

------
pieter_mj
As with previous presentations, the author has struck educational gold so to
speak.

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sergiotapia
I feel lucky I get to watch these slides at 5K resolution on my iMac! Amazing!

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matiasb
Cool!

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ChicagoBoy11
Incredible work!

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irascible
The author of this is both a programmer and an artist. Totally inspiring work.

