Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/10/raytracing-with-mysql.html
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I remember that years ago some company (I can’t find the article) made a Real-time ray tracing video card (like around 2010) that basically solved the problem by using lots of memory and clever matrix math.
This must be doing something similar with tables and joins, very cool!
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I think I’m going to be sick
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I never thought we’d be rendering real-time databases inside a web browser but, here we are.
Onward!
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i first ray traced on a c=64 in 6502 assembly language , a black and white wine glass of very low resolution , but !
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gotta have a hobby.
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As someone who has spent their career bouncing between coding and pixeling, I really want to feel something other than creeping horror at the thought of this. Yet I can’t.
However, it makes my previous work of building stored procedures that emit other stored procedures as part of a user-configurable branching system seem downright quaint and sane.
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This is beautiful in the same way a full cathedral made of bottlecaps would be beautiful. As they’d say before Burgess overwhelmed the phrase, it’s “[beautiful] as a clockwork orange.”
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This seems both impressive and perverse.
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Nice! IMHO it would even be better if the scenery description was stored in tables.
Reminds me of the raytracer written for the Obfuscated PostScript Contest in 1993. Back in the days, you could jam your department printer with this file for 30 minutes, depending on the CPU power. I just downloaded it and the Previewer on MacOS renders it in a few seconds. Moore’s Law at work…
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I’ve considered putting together a ray tracer that outputs a spreadsheet where each cell is a formula to compute the color of a single pixel. Then you could modify non-geometry parameters like lighting and textures and just let your spreadsheet program recalculate the image. With modern spreadsheets, you can probably even set cell styles to turn the values into actual colors.
Admittedly, it’s pretty far down on my list of things to try.
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As someone who offloads SQL operations into application code at the slightest provocation, this both frightens and amazes me.
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That just doesn’t sound right.
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Coincidentially the two exact opposites of hardcore DBA’s and Dev’s.
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