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#ambientocclusion — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #ambientocclusion, aggregated by home.social.

  1. Undefined terrain (2010)

    Early research sketches for an experimental, mapping/GIS-inspired UI prototype. The idea was to place different content pieces on an initially empty flat surface and then use traffic/access patterns to erode the space around each item, slowly forming a 2.5D terrain of valleys/canyons visualizing/revealing navigational usage patterns and creating a vast navigable space. My initial prototype (shown here) was for the terrain to be constructed from a pre-rendered set of isometric tiles with pre-baked ambient occlusion shadow maps (for which I wrote a custom AO renderer in Java). The thousands of tiles were loaded as a single PNG sprite sheet for in-browser canvas drawing (this was before WebGL)... Terrain erosion simulation was done dynamically via my toxiclibs simutils library (which I partially ported to JavaScript)...

    (Later on I built a cloud-based tool to create better simulations, use #Sunflow with custom extensions to pre-render daily super high-resolution maps, slice results into thousands of map tiles/zoom levels and then use Google Maps API with a custom map layer to create the UI. Sadly the entire project was cancelled just before launch...

    #Vintage #UI #Prototype #Mapping #Isometric #AmbientOcclusion #Renderer

  2. Undefined terrain (2010)

    Early research sketches for an experimental, mapping/GIS-inspired UI prototype. The idea was to place different content pieces on an initially empty flat surface and then use traffic/access patterns to erode the space around each item, slowly forming a 2.5D terrain of valleys/canyons visualizing/revealing navigational usage patterns and creating a vast navigable space. My initial prototype (shown here) was for the terrain to be constructed from a pre-rendered set of isometric tiles with pre-baked ambient occlusion shadow maps (for which I wrote a custom AO renderer in Java). The thousands of tiles were loaded as a single PNG sprite sheet for in-browser canvas drawing (this was before WebGL)... Terrain erosion simulation was done dynamically via my toxiclibs simutils library (which I partially ported to JavaScript)...

    (Later on I built a cloud-based tool to create better simulations, use #Sunflow with custom extensions to pre-render daily super high-resolution maps, slice results into thousands of map tiles/zoom levels and then use Google Maps API with a custom map layer to create the UI. Sadly the entire project was cancelled just before launch...

    #Vintage #UI #Prototype #Mapping #Isometric #AmbientOcclusion #Renderer

  3. Undefined terrain (2010)

    Early research sketches for an experimental, mapping/GIS-inspired UI prototype. The idea was to place different content pieces on an initially empty flat surface and then use traffic/access patterns to erode the space around each item, slowly forming a 2.5D terrain of valleys/canyons visualizing/revealing navigational usage patterns and creating a vast navigable space. My initial prototype (shown here) was for the terrain to be constructed from a pre-rendered set of isometric tiles with pre-baked ambient occlusion shadow maps (for which I wrote a custom AO renderer in Java). The thousands of tiles were loaded as a single PNG sprite sheet for in-browser canvas drawing (this was before WebGL)... Terrain erosion simulation was done dynamically via my toxiclibs simutils library (which I partially ported to JavaScript)...

    (Later on I built a cloud-based tool to create better simulations, use #Sunflow with custom extensions to pre-render daily super high-resolution maps, slice results into thousands of map tiles/zoom levels and then use Google Maps API with a custom map layer to create the UI. Sadly the entire project was cancelled just before launch...

    #Vintage #UI #Prototype #Mapping #Isometric #AmbientOcclusion #Renderer