WIP atmosphere implementation of "Production Ready Atmosphere Rendering" (Hillaire... 2020) with ARC coefficients using Slang & WebGPU. On the ground, an RGBA16F 200x100 sky-view LUT is sampled, but in space, I raymarch for per-pixel transmittance at higher precision.show more

⚡ THIS IS NOT CGI. THIS IS LIGHTNING FROM... SPACE. High above powerful thunderstorms, something incredible sometimes appears near the edge of space… glowing red shapes that look like giant jellyfish floating in the sky. They’re called Red Sprites. These massive electrical bursts form 30–50 miles above storms in the upper atmosphere. Instead of the bright white lightning we see on the ground, sprites glow an eerie crimson red with long tendrils stretching downward through the sky. The crazy part? They only last a few milliseconds — faster than a blink — which is why capturing them on camera is extremely rare. Pilots reported seeing them for decades, but scientists didn’t officially confirm their existence until 1989. When you see one, you're literally watching lightning reaching toward space. 🌌⚡show more

WHAT is going on with Avalanche's stablecoin ecosystem?! Avalanche🔺'... stablecoin supply is up an outrageous +50% on the week, reaching a total of nearly $1.8 billion at time of writing, per DefiLlama. The only three chains to see higher % growth in the period are Plume, Pharos | Mainnet Arc and Soneium 💿, all of which have small stablecoin ecosystems of <$20 million. $AVAX is now dangerously close to catching Aptos $APT ($1.89B) and flipping it for the #10 spot.show more

Space objects such as meteoroids and asteroids move across... the solar system and can collide with both Earth and the Moon. However, the Moon shows far more visible impact marks on its surface. One main reason is that Earth has a thick atmosphere that protects the planet. When many meteoroids enter Earth’s atmosphere, they burn up due to friction before they can reach the ground. This process creates the bright streaks of light we call shooting stars. The Moon, however, has almost no atmosphere, so incoming space rocks are not slowed down or burned up. They travel directly to the lunar surface and strike it at very high speed. Each collision creates an impact crater, throwing dust and rocks outward from the impact point. Over billions of years, thousands of these impacts have covered the Moon with craters. Unlike Earth, the Moon also has no wind, water, or weather to erase these craters, so they remain visible for millions or even billions of years. This is why the Moon looks heavily cratered when we observe it from Earth through telescopes.show more

When I play arcade games at home, I could... just set them to free play, but I actually prefer inserting coins myself. The sound of the coin rolling in and the credit counter going up is a huge part of the experience for me. It really brings back the feeling of being in an arcade back then. That’s why I even use an old cigarette ashtray as a coin holder. At first, I bought a chair that looked similar to an arcade stool, but the height felt strangely uncomfortable. So I ended up ordering actual Japanese arcade stools from a company in Japan, and the height is just perfect👌 Once you own an arcade cabinet, collecting little accessories like that becomes part of the fun too. And when you hang game posters on the wall, the whole atmosphere becomes incredible😆show more

⚡️ THESE ARE NOT JELLYFISH… THEY’RE LIGHTNING FROM SPACE.... High above powerful thunderstorms, something extraordinary sometimes appears in the sky — glowing red shapes that look like giant jellyfish floating near the edge of space. They’re called Red Sprites. These massive electrical bursts occur 30–50 miles above storm clouds, triggered by powerful lightning strikes below. Instead of the bright white flash we see on the ground, sprites glow an eerie crimson red, with long tendrils stretching downward through the upper atmosphere. The wild part? They last only a few milliseconds — faster than a blink. For decades pilots reported seeing them, but scientists didn’t officially confirm their existence until 1989. Today, they remain one of the rarest atmospheric phenomena ever captured on camera. If you ever see them, you’re witnessing lightning reaching toward space. 🌌⚡️ Have you ever seen Red Sprites before? 👀show more

Introducing Kaleido💮 from AI at Meta — a universal... generative neural rendering engine for photorealistic, unified object and scene view synthesis. Kaleido is built on a simple but powerful design philosophy: 3D perception is a form of visual common sense. Following this idea, we formulate rendering purely as a sequence-to-sequence generation problem, successfully unifying neural rendering with the architecture principles behind modern language and video models. Unlike traditional neural rendering methods, Kaleido learns 3D purely in a data-driven way, without explicit 3D representations or structures. It acquires spatial understanding directly through large-scale video pretraining, then multi-view 3D data finetuning, inspired by how LLMs acquire textual common sense from large corpora before specialising in domains like coding. Through extensive ablations, we progressively modernised the architecture design and training strategies and tackled key scaling challenges in sequence-to-sequence generative rendering, arriving at a design that’s simple, versatile, and scalable. Kaleido significantly outperforms prior generative models in few-view settings, and remarkably is the first zero-shot generative method matches InstantNGP-level rendering quality in multi-view settings. We view Kaleido also as an alternative step towards world modeling that flexibly spans a spectrum of “realities": with many views, it faithfully reconstructs grounded reality; with fewer views, it imagines plausible unseen details. 🔗 Explore more results and paper:show more

Is Google taking initial steps to enhance Street View?... For some reason, Street View seems stuck in technology that feels outdated. I wonder if we'll see such improvements on the product side. Also, note how much better it performs in all aspects compared to Zip-NeRF in their presented material. It offers more details and fewer artifacts. Great work! "LODGE: Level-of-Detail Large-Scale Gaussian Splatting with Efficient Rendering" Contributions: • We propose a novel LOD representation for 3DGS which, unlike previous methods [27, 28, 17], does not recompute the list of used Gaussians at each frame. This allows for acceleration and compaction, enabling the rendering of large-scale scenes even on mobile devices. • We design a strategy to automatically select optimal hyperparameters for splitting LODs, whereas most other methods require manual tuning of hyperparameters for each 3D scene. • To further accelerate rendering, we split the scene into chunks and pre-compute sets of active Gaussians per chunk. • Finally, we introduce a novel opacity interpolation scheme to produce visually pleasing rendering and eliminate artifacts when transitioning between chunks.show more

The 3.7 cm SockelFlak L/14.5 was a lightweight German... AA gun from late World War I. Designed by Krupp for Zeppelin defense but too heavy for air use, it hit the ground in 1917 at just 474 pounds with a short 14.5-caliber barrel firing 37mm rounds at 1,150 fps up to 7,200 feet. It fed 10-round clips at 120 rounds per minute on a 360-degree pedestal mount, using a knee trigger for fast tracking despite dirt jams. Around 150 were built in 1917 with the first 20 delivered in December. An order for 190 was placed but only 150 reached service by the November 1918 armistice, seeing limited action as one of Germany's earliest dedicated light AA guns.show more

Hi Megyn Kelly. We've met in lovely circumstances a... couple of times and I don't think you are an antisemite, but your comment that: "I don't think [Tucker] is an antisemite at all, but I don't really care [because he is an important voice in the national conversation]" for the very first time sent chills down my spine. I've been in touch with your team back and forth for months. Would you please consider having me on to have a civil, courteous discussion about all of this and to hear and consider platforming another view from someone who admires and respects you immensely? The conversation IS as important as you say and you can platform whoever you want. But would you please consider having another view on about it with someone who likes you and is the grandchild of four holocaust survivors? Thank you, Jeff Laxshow more

The perfect video to view on Holi… Because the... colours of India spring up in many different ways & surprise us. Chillis laid out for drying create an amazingly beautiful tapestry when seen from above. This is Guntur district in Andhra Pradesh which alone has a share of 15% in India’s chilli production. Can, & should AP turn this seasonal crop into a tourist attraction? It’s a winter harvest so the timing is right. I’ve never been, but I suspect the problem is that the beauty of the patterns may not be visible at ground level. Balloon rides? Curate performances of local music and dance at that time & create a festival? Other ideas? I know many will feel that it should be left free of potentially disruptive tourists. But that overlooks the opportunity for the local farmers and communities to supplement their incomes. Lokesh Narashow more

MiniMax H3 Instead of sharing the prompts for each... of these videos, I thought it would be more useful to share how I created that prompts. All of the videos were generated with text-to-video. First, find an image with the kind of scene, composition and mood you want to recreate. I used a few YouTube playlist thumbnails as references but Pinterest is also a great place to find inspiration. You can even use your own old or nostalgic photographs. Then upload the image to ChatGPT and ask it to describe the scene. The description it gives you can essentially become your text-to-video prompt. From there, you can generate completely new scenes with a similar composition, atmosphere and cinematic language. You can of course use the reference image directly with image-to-video or as a first frame. But if the original image isn't yours, I prefer using it only as visual inspiration and recreating the scene through text-to-video. This is the prompt I use with ChatGPT: "Describe the scene in this image in English, focusing primarily on what is happening, the characters, their actions and body language, the setting and the overall atmosphere. Also briefly describe the composition, framing, camera angle, approximate lens choice, lighting, color palette and cinematic aesthetic. Keep it concise and scene-focused rather than overly technical."show more

As a graphics engine coder I think when you... look at a flickering bug like this one in the video below it’s not immediately obvious what is going on. The key here is observation - to study this flickering/bugged render carefully - what do we see? Firstly for me it was very obvious that nearly all of the scene shadows were flashing on and off - but (but!) there was a secondary issue where some buildings and parts of the sky were also flashing purple. Hmmmm. Interesting. I initially thought then this might be two separate bugs - but because the sky purple element could only based on full screen post fx and not 3D rendering I looked at this first with a few GPU captures to step through all our post processing to find the rendering stage which made these pixels turn purple: When I did this I found the colour 3D texture LUT grading that makes our different biomes have unique colour palettes was going very wrong - colours near 0 or 1 were wrapping and making the purple elements that we see in the said sky and base parts. The only way this could happen was if the texture was corrupt (which it was not) or if the 3D texture sampling was wrapping and not clamped as intended. That was the Eureka moment - because if the post fx had the wrong texture sampler then the disappearing shadows which also require an exact texture sampler for comparing depth might be also wrong because of the same kind of texture sampling issue! So with this idea that the engine was using the wrong texture samplers, but only in very high draw call scenes like the big base here I the looked at some engine limits and found the bug very quickly - a circular dx12 descriptor buffer for samplers running out over multiple frames, reusing the wrong data for new scenes inflight. Hence the flickering, as the GPU randomly got wrong samplers for some post textures or shadow depth. Easy to fix with triple limits for future expansion and also adding an assert/debug spam in case this limit is ever reached again - QA testers would see this message and report if they ever saw a flicker with this style of bug. My bug and my bad from 2017 porting NMS to DX12 without foreseeing how massively complex bases and our game would grow.show more

I know a lot of people hate on AI.... I get it. Be creative. But for those of use who can't draw or animate, this is more of a quick and cheap fix. and there's nothing wrong with that. I wish others were more open about sharing what they've learned using AI and not hoard their knowledge like it's worth gold. The only way we can learn and improve is if others share what they've learned. I understand people are protective of what prompts they use. Ok fine, don't share them. But you can't even give a tip? Like "add this phrase to the prompt for better [fill in the blank]" or "use [blank] for a more realistic atmosphere]. Just pisses me off. I'm happy to share all I've learned with anyone who askes. Same happened in the 3d printing community with crushable printed houses. No one wanted to share anything. So I gave up on that. #sizetwitter #giantess #AIart #giantessai #Sora2 #soraArtshow more

JUST IN: 🇮🇱 Israel Eyes A New Weapon Frontier,... Striking Earth From Space Israel is looking to expand its military capabilities beyond the atmosphere, with Defense Minister Israel Katz saying the country wants to become the first to develop a true space to ground attack capability. The broader plan reportedly includes more advanced satellites, encrypted communications, cyberwarfare capabilities and stronger missile defense systems. One concept being discussed echoes the U.S. “Rods from God” idea, using extremely dense tungsten projectiles dropped from orbit at immense speeds to generate devastating kinetic impacts without conventional explosives. Israel is considering around 16 billion shekels ($5.4 billion) in space investment over the next decade, although the funding has not yet been secured. If successfully developed, it could push warfare into a new domain, turning orbit from a platform for surveillance and communication into a potential strike platform against targets on Earth.show more

The next time you fly, India's space technology could... help bring your aircraft safely to the ground. For the first time, a commercial jet in India successfully landed using GAGAN, ISRO's indigenous satellite navigation system, marking a major milestone for Indian aviation. Developed by ISRO and the Airports Authority of India, GAGAN guided an IndiGo Airbus A320 during a successful satellite based landing approach at Udaipur Airport. Instead of relying heavily on expensive ground based navigation equipment, GAGAN uses satellite technology to provide highly accurate landing guidance. This could help more airports offer precision landings, improve safety during poor weather, reduce flight diversions, and make India's aviation network more efficient and future ready. ISRO | Airports Authority of India #ISRO #GAGAN #IndianAviation [ISRO, GAGAN, IndiGo, Indian Aviation Technology]show more

What if you could turn a single 360° photo... into a production-ready Isaac Sim environment in minutes? That's exactly what we did here. Using World Labs' Marble and an Insta360 X5 capture (rotating on top), we generated a complete navigable 3D environment and populated it with Lightwheel Sim Ready assets (bottom view). The result? A fully interactive scene in Isaac Sim, ready for sim2real testing,. Navigation, manipulation, or any robotics task you need to validate. What used to take weeks of manual 3D modeling and asset placement now takes minutes. Capture once in the real world, simulate everywhere in your training pipeline. This is the future of robotics development with world models. NVIDIA Robotics NVIDIA Omniverse #Sim2Real #Robotics #Simulationshow more

Brandon Clarke is perhaps the coolest player to play... a season at Gonzaga, holding what I view as the coolest stat and highlight in program history. Clarke averaged nearly 17 points per game on 68% field goal efficiency while being an elite defender with 3.2 blocks per game. CLARKE HAD AS MANY BLOCKS AS HE HAD MISSED FIELD GOALS in his lone season in Spokane. He also gave us an all-time defensive highlight. Not only stealing the soul of the player who tried dunking on him but also the entire Tennessee bench seeing him rob a jam. RIP to a special, special dude.show more