Barth Cave

Hello everyone!

It’s been a while since I last posted. I was busy getting a job among other things, but now I’m back, and I have been cooking!

TLDR

• Minimal setup on Github
• Simple Dockerfile to run the tests
• Github Actions CI to run the tests on PRs

Introduction

In the past few months, my space exploration game, Cosmos Journeyer, has been growing quite a lot, creating new challenges that some of you are probably familiar with if you are making any large project.

Hello again!

This is the 2nd post of the procedural space station series aiming at creating realistic space station for Cosmos Journeyer through the awesome power of science! The previous post about energy is not required to understand this one, but you can read it here if you are interested.

In the previous article, we created a model for the surface of solar panels needed to power our space stations. But we also need to create habitable sections where people will live their life in comfort, just like you are doing right now I hope ^^ (make yourself at ease!)

How can we create realistic looking space stations? How to make them feel grounded and functional? That’s what I want to explore it this series of blog posts while developing the new space stations for Cosmos Journeyer. Here is a sneak peak:

In this first one, we will talk about solar panels. They are an iconic part of the look of space stations: from Mir to the ISS, and Tiangong to the upcoming Lunar Gateway, they all have them! So it’s only natural that my procedural space stations will have them too.

Introduction

It’s been a few month since I started pondering making a better ocean for Cosmos Journeyer’s procedural planets. To have actual waves moving around and not just a scrolling normal maps would make a significant difference in visual quality.

Coincidentally, I was also taking a course on computer animation (INF585) at Ecole Polytechnique, and I had the opportunity to choose my final project. Long stroy short, I decided to implement Jerry Tessendorf’s FFT-based ocean simulation on WebGPU, and this is my project report.

Alright, I was looking for an easy way to add comments to my blog. I found 2 popular solutions: Disqus and Cusdis (the names look interestingly similar!).

On the one hand we have Disqus, a widely used comment system, but it’s not privacy-friendly and it’s not open-source. Bummer.

On the other hand, we have Cusdis, a privacy-friendly free and open-source comment system that has a lot of potential. Comments do not need an account to be posted, it is lightweight and it’s easy to use with hugo… at least in theory. You can even host it yourself if you want to!

I have been making a soft body simulation in C++ for my IMA904/IG3DA class at Telecom Paris, and I thought I could share my project report here! This one is quite light on the implementation details and is more focused on the high level ideas.

I added many example videos from the original report to make it more interesting to read!

Anyway, here is what you can expect from this article:

If you ever tried a VR headset at home, you probably know that full immersion can be dangerous for your surroundings. When I was setting up the IGD301 VR project in Unity, I punched my laptop screen very hard with one of the controllers (it survived no worries!).

These moments are VR fails, when the immersion make you forget about reality. Here I will present 2 scenarios where immersion can be dangerous.

In the previous article, we developped a selection technique for a VR supermarket. Here is the result we achieved:

You should probably read the previous article first: https://barthpaleologue.github.io/Blog/posts/vr-with-unity-6/

Today’s blog post is all about evaluation. We will see how we can evaluate a selection technique, and how we can use the results to find ways to improve it.

Okay the course is coming to a close and now we have to make a final project. The task is quite straightforward: select grocery items in a supermarket.

The idea is to implement one of the selection techniques of last time and evaluate it along a few metric such as accuracy, speed, user satisfaction, etc. This blog post will cover the implementation of the technique and the next one will cover the evaluation.

Okay, I know what you are thinking: “Non Euclidean Black holes? What is this guy talking about?”. I know, I told myself so at first, but bear with me, it is actually fun!

What is a black hole?

A black hole is a region of space where the gravitational field get so strong the bending of spacetime becomes very noticable (and deadly, mom’s spaghetti). It becomes so strong that scientists predict the bending becomes infinite at its center at what is called a singularity. This is where the laws of physics breaks down and we don’t know what happens.