A Collaborative Browser Based Raytracer

http://peterbraden.co.uk/projects/badoomph/demo

by peterbraden • 17 years ago

41 22 17 years ago

peterbraden.co.uk

smunro• 17 years ago

Awesome work!

moonbox• 17 years ago

Great work. This is definitely an exciting step in a new direction of rendering.

thunk• 17 years ago

This is going to totally re^H^Hinvent social raytracing.

profquail• 17 years ago

Pixar should team up with Facebook and Myspace to render their next movie!

ramidarigaz2• 17 years ago

Just out of curiosity, what does ^H^H mean?

pwmanagerdied• 17 years ago

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backspace:

Pressing the backspace key on a computer terminal would generate the ASCII code 08, BS or Backspace, which would delete the preceding character. That control code could also be accessed by pressing Control-H, as H is the eighth letter of the Latin alphabet. Terminals which did not have the backspace code mapped to the function of moving the cursor backwards and deleting the preceding character would display the symbols ^H (caret, H — see Caret notation) when the backspace key was pressed. This sequence is still used humorously for epanorthosis by computer literates, denoting the deletion of a pretended blunder, much like overstriking.

Example: My slave-dri^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hboss decided to stall the project.

jacquesm• 17 years ago

You're showing your age :)

Try ctrl-h on your keyboard.

calcnerd2563• 17 years ago

Does it detect poisoning? If not, only good will prevents somebody from goatse-ing the image.

mrcharles• 17 years ago

I'm not sure that would work -- since each person gets the next line in the batch (seems like anyway), the best you can do is poison a few random lines. making a cohesive image out of that would mean you'd have to poison the source data.

peterbraden2• 17 years ago

At the moment no - a trust system is on the wishlist. But as has been mentioned, you'd have to poison every line. But yep, that's a current vulnerability.

jrbedard• 17 years ago

Very cool! it's like the browser version of Autodesk's Backburner network ;)

wmf2• 17 years ago

This fails for the same reason the JavaScript entries failed to make a dent in the Engine Yard contest: When JavaScript is roughly 1000x slower than GPUs, even borrowing other people's browsers isn't enough to make up the difference. Also, real ray tracing generally involves huge source data that would have to be downloaded to each client.

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

It's only a proof-of-concept. Maybe GPU-based raytracing could be shared, with the browser just working as a sort of task brokerage.

peterbraden2• 17 years ago

But that's the whole point. Sure javascript is slooow and with the small number of browsers visiting the demo, this isn't even comparable to the performance of a GPU.

It's the potential. You have literally millions of computers on the internet right now, capable of running this code.

Also, raytracing is only an example. But what large data set do you need for raytracing? I guess if you had a massive mesh then that might add up/

calcnerd2563• 17 years ago

This seems like the beginning of another argument in favor of an idea I've been kicking around for a little while now: combine http with bittorrent in some seamless fashion to really make more of the web better distributed.

wlievens• 17 years ago

These guys are doing that:

http://www.pluraprocessing.com/

kragen3• 17 years ago

I have the impression that some of the modern JavaScript engines lose less than a factor of 10× over the raw power of the CPU. Do you think the CPU-GPU gap is going to widen or narrow in upcoming years?

wmf2• 17 years ago

The gap will probably widen until Haswell where CPUs and GPUs merge.

A Collaborative Browser Based Raytracer

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