

Ask HN: What would be a proper Boing ball demo for a current Amiga - rbanffy

With the recent announcement of new Amiga computers based on PPC and XCore processors, what would be the "Boing ball demo" that could impress current geeks as much as Boing impressed those in the mid 80-s? What would be the readily identifiable impressive, even to the non-initiated, show of graphical prowess for current desktop PCs?
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rbanffy
No ideas?

I know it's hard. Graphics and polygon count would not impress the PS3
generation, but what would? Real-time video interference? A new desktop-less
webcam-captured gesture-oriented 3D environment?

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slater
How about a realtime ray-traced version of multiple balls, with the viewpoint
turning around the balls?

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rbanffy
That would require the watcher to be educated. It's an impressive technical
achievement, but people see the same kind of image everyday on the TV. It's
just not real-time.

You could compute the physics of billions of snowflakes in an video in real-
time, but, still, unless your audience is educated to appreciate what you are
doing and the immense implications of having a computer capable of doing that,
it's lost.

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slater
In that case, there's not much you CAN show, visually, unless it's up there
with Avatar-like quality of imagery.

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rbanffy
I know. That's why it's hard to answer the question.

A quantitative improvement in display quality and performance is not enough.
And, remember, Amigas were relatively inexpensive machines targeted at home
users (the whole video art thing was an accident), so, making the thing output
2160p120 3D video is not an option unless you could do that on a budget.

