Amazing 3D HD Content Crammed Into 4KB
Demoscene group RGBA has managed to cram under four minutes of HD imagery into 4KB.
Demoscene group RGBA managed to cram high-def textured rolling landscapes, a music player, a light show (which syncs to the background tune), and various camera shots--ultimately comprising under four minutes of HD footage--into one very small 4KB file. The demo, entitled Elevated, is the result of a recent Breakpoint competition that challenged coders to cram as much as possible within the 4KB limit. As the contest winner, Elevated shows what can be accomplished using extremely tight code, and does so extremely well.
"Just so people get an idea of how much four kilobytes is," said Inigo Quilez, one of the coders in RGBA, "let's say that it's what one of those little static icons on your desktop takes. Or that one second of music in MP3 format, which is already pretty well compressed, takes a lot more than four kilobytes. Yet we managed to show almost four minutes of music and animation at full high-definition image quality."
As reported by TechRadar, most of the demo's data structures are generated within the system RAM at runtime using "a variety of techniques." Quilez said that Elevated is basically a huge formula that encodes shapes, textures, colors, and rhythms. The system evaluates the formula and "expands" the visual content. With that said, cramming content as seen in Elevated into a 4KB is no simple task. In fact, it's not easy at all.
"The formula and its subpart or subformulas are designed to mimic a terrain, which is more or less simple and has been done thousands of times since mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot first did it in the early '80s," he explained. "Colors are simply numbers for the computer, and the color of each pixel of the screen is the result of evaluating this big formula."
To check out Elevated, download the actual demo in ZIP format here, or download the AVI version here.
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Gotta love stuff like this.
Anyone else remember [and love] kkreiger?
Interesting.
Can these techniques be used with actual video and audio?
Cool, Kind if reminds me of the stuff from
http://www.theprodukkt.com/
They have some very cool stuff as well.
symantec won't let you see any of the 4K files, it flags all of them as trojans and moves to quarantine.
This is very impressive
Interesting. Can these techniques be used with actual video and audio?
Kind of, not really, maybe in the future? The idea as I understand it from studying theprodukkt [and kkreiger by association] is that you use math to compute textures, sound, and such. When sound synth becomes better maybe the same tricks can be used to reproduce music "from scratch", but for now it's a mostly midi-synth, polygon and texture kind of thing.
On a side note, I remember a single 64k demo from the produkkt stating at the end that it had uncompressed and created 3 terabytes of data during run-time. These people are geniuses, simply enough.
symantec won't let you see any of the 4K files, it flags all of them as trojans and moves to quarantine.
Avast, AVG, etc. Stop paying for bloated software!
So here's what I view it as: a skewed portrayal of the value of hard drive space and processing power.
In other words, we prioritized hard drive space massively and devoted more into the original formula or encoding. In a world where everyone's computer was running at 90ghz with several terabytes of RAM, but harddrives were only in the single-digit megabytes sizes, then this sort of thing would pop up more frequently and would be used universally.
Fortunately, we settled for a different balance. Encoding and design does not take an absurd amount of time and fine-tuning and programming, and (sorta) in exchange, our video files often reach the gigabyte range, both of which are things we can afford and accept.
This stuff is cool, but impractical for the typically desired use of displaying ARBITRARY video, such as video frames for a movie. You're basically just wandering around an interesting mathematical formula, known to produce interesting terrain when interpreted in a certain way. Try to derive the formula that encodes, say, Bourne Ultimatum, and I'd be more impressed.
Yay! Me hi-def torrents go faster!
If this is so cool then why did it crash my Lap Top so comprehensivly? Yes Norton flags the files as Trojans and I made the mistake of trying to open one of them. Had to hard reset and the reboot took nearly 30 minutes with a 3 step file check so anybody using Norton just be aware of that!
Just an FYI, Symantec Endpoint found "Trojan Horse" in the "elevated_1280x1024.exe" file within the zip archive.
T
This stuff is cool, but impractical for the typically desired use of displaying ARBITRARY video, such as video frames for a movie. You're basically just wandering around an interesting mathematical formula, known to produce interesting terrain when interpreted in a certain way. Try to derive the formula that encodes, say, Bourne Ultimatum, and I'd be more impressed.
I remember a demo of that type of tech a while back (15yrs?), basically encoding a scene as a complex fractal alogorithm. What was impressive was that the system would let you zoom to an arbitrary level of detail not visible in the original picture - distant trees reavealing branches / leaves etc. Not that the reavealed detail was a true representation, just another level deeper into the fractal.
I don't think the virus warnings are real - just a side effect of the compression used here - and if they are and someone has managed to pack that much content AND a trojan into a 4k file, well my PC just got 0wned by a genius, what can you do?
thats just amazing
If only operating systems were coded this well. :-p
Very interesting, I can see a great way to utilize tight code like this, and that's in gaming. Random 3d environments (eg diabloesque style randomization) would be well to do with this type of coding. As for the music, there is already a project floating about out there that is trying to accomplish the music reproduction.
It'd be great for digital distribution of games, or cramming games on small thumb drives.
Procedural rendering has found its way into some games... IIRC Oblivion used procedurally rendered trees. It can be useful but isn't applicable in most cases. You have to be able to mathematically define the object in order to render it from code. Things of a fractal nature (like landscapes and trees) are great candidates, and these videos are a cool way of showing what can be done with tight clean code.
LOL and how big is the player to play that file? 400mb?
win 7 keeps telling me app has stopped working, might be nod 64s handywork, but, do i see floppys makin a comeback, cheap hd storage media for sale.
I have Norton 360 v3 (which IS awesome BTW) and it sees no viruses. I can't, however, open the 1920x1080 file in Win 7 64-bit. Anyone else running Win 7 64?
On 7 I can't even run the program.. It starts but ends without a result shown here. 7 and Avast (avast doesn't flag a thing).
I tried running it but killed it after its memory usage hit 500MB.
For reference I ran the 1920x1080 HQ version.
i hav win 7 x64, has anyone been able to run them, i cant even run 1024x768
I suspect it was built for a specific version of Direct X. I tried running it on two machines, on one it played music but no video... on the other it wouldn't run at all.
Apache_lives - on a machine with the right dx install - you don't need a player to play the video. However... Direct X does provide a LOT of support code that the example requires to work, so you're right that it's not REALLY 4k.
I recall when the trend of making these sorts of procedural graphical apps started... there wasn't dx or dynamic libraries, the apps had to render to the device. They were still VERY compact, but not 4k compact.
symantec won't let you see any of the 4K files, it flags all of them as trojans and moves to quarantine.
I have Norton360, and it does not see any virus or trojan in them
However, I can not start this file on my GMA945GM powered notebook. I get an error message.
I have WinXP and can't run,and I second that Norton 360 removes the 1280x1024 file!
It probably needs MS .net framework installed too (which I purposely not installed, because it saves space, and increases system response time when it not being installed.
Many programmers program with C++ or something alike, and need .net framework for their programs to run.
Apart from that I have DX9.0c which is the latest for XP, so it should run, but doesn't.
[citation][nom]ProDigit80[/nom]It probably needs MS .net framework installed too (which I purposely not installed, because it saves space, and increases system response time when it not being installed.Many programmers program with C++ or something alike, and need .net framework for their programs to run.citation]
It shouldn't, unless the program uses .Net it doesn't need it and unless you manually (ASM) create the EXE you won't be able to get an EXE less then 1kb.
This reminds me (as others have stated) .theprodukkt, wish they would release something new.
It may be just several pieces of code which start with random numbers and dynamically create the landscape and music based on rules and context.
If you take a look at the readme file provided you will see that running the demo requires a good GPU - a HD 4850 or better is recommended.
I think I've seen this before...
It's not new if memory serves me correct...
mine acted like it wasn't going to work the first time i tried it, so I killed it, it ran the second time, I just had to wait a little longer(it needs something saying "Loading")
http://www.demoscene.tv/