Benedikt Bitterli, a graphics researcher, writes about light transport simulation, astrophotography, and rendering, with interactive browser demos.
Commenters praise his interactive Tantalum light simulation and Buddhabrot animation, and HN uses his work as an example of what the web can do beyond static pages.
Well I never formalized it in library or code that has survived to this day. But in a general sense, what you do is load your images as raw as you're comfortable working with them, and then define a pipeline that can:
* Stack or integrate: this means turning 100 high-noise images into a single, low noise image. To do that, you need:
* Registration or alignment: this is simply making sure that the stars are placed consistently on the same (x, y) location so that when you stack you don't get trails or blurring. High quality registration can go as far as sharpening your end result if you manage sub-pixel alignment (or you can strecth for super-resolution).
* Post-processing: it can be anything from removing light pollution (important if you're shooting from within a city), remove gradients (airglow, or residual light pollution even if you are far away from a city), sharpening (Lucy-Richardson deconvolution is king here using gaussian kernels, but if you can aproximate a Point Spread Function -or PSF for short- you can get even better results), color correction, high dynamic range processing. Of course, this is an un-ending place.
PixInsight is a great tool, I won't deny that. But I had a great joy in learning how to program this things, and to me it's a lot more interesting researching how to do something, learning it and programming it, rather than having it done by somebody else, clicking a button and moving away.
Luckily for both you and I, Bennedict Bitterli has…
Very cool (note that you can place the light and drag it's direction)!
One thing I noticed is that this visualizes how dangerous laser light can be.
A lot of DIY projects these days use lasers (SLA printers, Laser cutters). You can't warn people enough about the risks when working with lasers.
This app shows how laser light bounces around in ways you don't expect.
Edit: and ofcourse the rest of his portfolio is great: https://benedikt-bitterli.me/portfolio.html
There's no reason to limit the web to static pages. How would you do this with a static page https://benedikt-bitterli.me/tantalum/tantalum.html ? Or http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/03/upshot/the-best-and-worst-places-to-grow-up-how-your-area-compares.html Or https://play.freeciv.org/ Or anything on this page http://www.kongregate.com/ or, you know, Facebook or Twitter or Google Maps/Books/Docs/Photos...?
> My guess is that it is just showing a standardized raytracing scene from a public research dataset used to compare raytracers.
It is a pretty common test scene, and one I've used myself. It originally comes from https://blendswap.com/blend/13552, and there are versions of it adapted into a test scene at https://benedikt-bitterli.me/resources/ and https://casual-effects.com/data/.
There is a excellent animation of the Buddabrot from Benedikt Bitterli at [1] and a description what he has done to produce it at [2].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxIcydL7wwY
[2] https://benedikt-bitterli.me/buddhabrot/index.html
The fluid simulations, like [1], could and should enable so many cool games.
I can't wait to see a revival of Lemmings, or Worms, with this kind of physics.
[1] https://benedikt-bitterli.me/bbw.html