Show HN: Galaxium, an experimental WebGPU space explorer(galaxium.app) |
Show HN: Galaxium, an experimental WebGPU space explorer(galaxium.app) |
I like the motion blur on the stars, but it increases the brightness of each star. It would look more consistent if the brightness of a star was constant regardless of motion. I guess the brightness increase makes things look cooler when you're warping through space but it's distracting when orbiting the camera around objects.
I think clicking to select things could be improved. Clicking on names is reliable but clicking on rendered objects seems unreliable. Sometimes clicking on a planet or star does nothing. Also my mousewheel seems quite slow to zoom, I know this is hard to tune across platforms on the web, I'm on Ubuntu 26 currently.
I can think of about a billion features to add. Real time clouds for Earth, a bunch more satellites and spacecraft, eclipses (Google Maps web 3D view renders these, crazily enough, if you set your system clock to the appropriate time), more terrain and high res imagery, multispectral imagery/rendering, relativistic effects, realistic close-up rendering of planetary rings, solar flares and fancier star rendering, binary stars orbiting each other, procedural generation of plausible stars and solar systems with exoplanets in other galaxies or unobserved parts of our own galaxy. Really depends on where you want to take it!
I built a WebGL viewer for our local solar system only[0]. If you happen to have the time to give any feedback I would sincerely appreciate it - you seem very knowledgeable about this.
[0]: https://orrery.ryboso.me/
EDIT: With apologies to OP, I don’t want to hijack your post.
I’m currently traveling without a laptop and can’t view your site on mobile - I would love to check it out and share my thoughts and trade experiences about building these space viewers once I have a laptop again in a couple days.
I haven't put nearly as much time into my project as you've put into yours - Galaxium is really polished and impressive. Well done!
I thought it was limited to the solar system until I accidentally kept zooming out, and got my mind blown a couple of times. And again when I saw the black hole.
This is ridiculously well made
Gravitational lensing around the black hole is mind blowing
This is on a 4GB 1650 Super, latest Firefox, Win10. It's an old card, sure, but it can still play most commercial games; I'm not sure why this thing is so hungry. Lots of big volumetric textures, maybe?
Requested allocation size (41967616) is smaller than the image requires (42778624).
at ImportMemory (../../third_party/dawn/src/dawn/native/vulkan/external_memory/MemoryServiceImplementationOpaqueFD.cpp:132)
I do find it sometimes hard to navigate and has some visual glitches, but man it is good. I hope one day it becomes my go-to for space exploring, since Space Engine is Windows only and it does not run on my Mac. And building the space must be a huge amount of work, there's so much that has to go into it.
In the meantime, you can explore the night sky at stellarium-web.org — it runs in any browser.
You borked it.
My feedback:
1. I wish the time scaling was persistent; I wanted to jump between solar system objects while keeping the accelerated time. A way to persist the scale would be lovely (maybe a slider in the header).
2. Pinning the object selector would be nice, too. It took me a minute to realize I could focus the text input to show the object selector again.
The earth rotation is probably not correct, I am in UK and sun has not set yet, but in Galaxium it is showing night in UK.
Btw, how many hours do you have in a day to build a non-commercial beta like this in just a year?! :D
I found several issues: 1. Selecting Voyagers and swam back in time: • The Sun was leaving a strange trace of light while moving backward through space; • When voyagers reached the Earth in 1977, they ricocheted from it and flew back into space; • When I changed the selected target during the time simulation, it stopped and lost its simulation speed 2. I can't move my cursor with arrows or Cmd | Option + <> combinations in the "Ask AI" input field
And a few thoughts from me: • You missed the favicon =) • Behavior, when you first should click on the object and then click "center" to fly to it, is a bit counterintuitive and confusing. I personally expected scroll target changes automatically when I clicked to a different object • What do you think about adding the same scale across the whole Universe (esp. in the local stars group) that the Local Group has with vertical lines from the plane of the ecliptic? • Should you add a few more DSO objects like TON 618 in the "Featured" catalog?
It’d be interesting to hear how you see this evolving and what the original idea was. Are you trying to compete with other universe exploration apps, or build it more like a browser-based atlas of the Universe?
For the issues:
1. Yes there are some bugs currently with the temporal anti aliasing. I was a bit aggressive on the effect because without it the Milky Way doesn't look good. I'll try to fix that (ideally it should adjust to the the velocity field).
2. All the time controls is still pretty much untested, I'll see if I can fix that.
3. I'd like to add more scale hints, but it's hard without cluttering the view. I'll see what I can do.
4. Yes at the moment there is only one black hole (sgr A*), I'll add more as soon as I can.
As for how this will evolve, I am not sure yet. I have a basic mobile version prototype working on iOS, so I thought this could turn into a mobile app at some point. No plan for an actual heavy PC app at the moment.
I love space "browsers" - I lose myself in them, just clicking through all the entities.
Also TIL that there are satellite galaxies, and I've never noticed those on other toys/tools like this. I always though Andromeda was the closest galaxy, but it is FAR away compared to `Sgr dSph` which is within 50kly from the center of the Milky Way.
So cool and impressive. Very well made.