White Light equals Brown Noise

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Here is a recent show­er thought:

It is usu­al­ly said that the col­ors of noise are inspired by the spec­tral dis­tri­b­u­tions of cor­re­spond­ing col­ors of light. For exam­ple, the ‘white’ in white noise is an allu­sion to white light which is thought to have a (most­ly) flat spec­trum. But is this so? How does white light actu­al­ly look like, as an elec­tro­mag­net­ic wave?

So I made fol­low­ing fig­ure which shows some pow­er-law dis­tri­b­u­tions in the vis­i­ble range of wave­lengths col­ored by their the­o­ret­i­cal appearance:

Fig 1: Spec­tral dis­tri­b­u­tions with expo­nents from 0 to −4.

The col­or of the flat line is also known as Stan­dard Illu­mi­nant E‍‍ – or equal-ener­gy white light. Com­pared to the D65 white back­ground it has a rather pink­ish appear­ance with a cor­re­lat­ed col­or tem­per­a­ture of about 5500 K.

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Spotify Performance

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Just a quick post to report on my find­ings of mea­sur­ing the ener­gy impact of three dif­fer­ent ways to have Spo­ti­fy play­ing in the back­ground: the Spo­ti­fy app and the web play­er using two dif­fer­ent browsers (Safari and Fire­fox).

Inspec­tion of the pack­age con­tents of the desk­top app reveals it to be just a con­tain­er ver­sion of the web play­er, bring­ing with it its own instance of a Chromi­um Embed­ded frame­work (for a whop­ping 168 MB, no less). So what we are real­ly see­ing is the per­for­mance of the web play­er in three dif­fer­ent brows­er engines.

So here are the num­bers, tak­en from the ‘ener­gy’ tab in Activ­i­ty Mon­i­tor, on a Mac Book Pro 15″ (2017), and in all cas­es the win­dow was invis­i­ble off-screen*. I also includ­ed iTunes play­ing a local file for comparison:

idle play­ing
Web play­er in Safari 14.0 < 0.1 2.1
Web play­er in Fire­fox 86 < 0.1 13.8
Spo­ti­fy App 1.1.53 (Chromi­um embedded) 2.3 3.4
iTunes 12.9 < 0.1 1.7

(*the respec­tive app was first expand­ed full screen, and then the focus was switched back to the desk­top so that the app win­dow was total­ly not shown, not even a min­i­mized win­dow or icon)

And the win­ner for run­ning Spo­ti­fy with the least ener­gy impact is actu­al­ly the Safari brows­er. Con­grat­u­la­tions to the Apple engi­neer­ing team! The desk­top app run­ning Chromi­um Embed­ded comes sec­ond (but with a curi­ous­ly high idle activ­i­ty), while Fire­fox only comes last.

In the hope that this infor­ma­tion was use­ful, make of it as you will :)

EDIT: I just learned that the web play­er does not sup­port loud­ness nor­mal­iza­tion so it is not even an apples-to-apples comparison!

Safari 14, Shadertoy and WebGL 2

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This is a quick post thrown togeth­er to report on my expe­ri­ence with the new Safari 14 regard­ing sup­port for WebGL 2. The news of improved WebGL sup­port was float­ed last month in the Shader­toy Com­mu­ni­ty Group:Fast for­ward to today and the Safari 14 update has now come to my lap­top (which still runs macOS Mojave). So the first thing I did check out all my shaders on Shader­toy and then some to see if the promis­es were true. My ver­dict (TL/DR):

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Sorting through comment spam is burdensome

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In order to keep this site spam free I approve every com­ment by hand. This means that com­ments will not imme­di­ate­ly appear after posting.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, com­ments tend to appear in bursts. There can be long stretch­es of no activ­i­ty (where I get noth­ing but spam), dur­ing which I will get lazy and will tend to check less and less often, only to be sur­prised when there are mul­ti­ple legit com­ments wait­ing (usu­al­ly after a link has been post­ed to social media).

So if you think your post got stuck just try again.

Correct sRGB Dithering

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This is a brain-dump inspired by a thread on twit­ter about cor­rect™ dither in sRGB, mean­ing, to choose the dither pat­tern in such a way as to pre­serve the phys­i­cal bright­ness of the orig­i­nal pix­els. This is in prin­ci­ple a solved prob­lem, but the dev­il is in the details that are eas­i­ly over­looked, espe­cial­ly when dither­ing to only a few quan­ti­za­tion levels.

So, this top­ic came up on twitter:

I had pre­vi­ous­ly spent some time to wrap my head around this exact prob­lem, so I shot from the hip with some pseu­do code that I used in Space Glid­er on Shader­toy. Code post­ings on twit­ter are nev­er a good idea, so here is a cleaned up ver­sion wrapped up in a prop­er function:

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Update of my 2013 FMX Slides on Physically Based Shading in PDF format

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The slides of my 2013 talk at FMX in Stuttgart were avail­able for down­load for a long time now in both Keynote and Pow­er­point for­mats. How­ev­er, peo­ple keep ask­ing for a PDF ver­sion. As I wrote in the com­ments once, I always had bad luck with the PDF export from Keynote, so I left it at that.

Yes­ter­day I made a major dis­cov­ery: The option “export to PDF” is not the only pos­si­bil­i­ty, in fact, it is quite an infe­ri­or one. The thing that I over­looked is that one can also just pre­tend to “print”, and then, in the sub­se­quent print­er dia­log, chose “save to PDF” instead. Not only does this give addi­tion­al options but also pro­duces nicer for­mat­ting and a small­er file!

I won­der how­ev­er the UI design­ers at Apple real­ly intend­ed this to be the pri­ma­ry means of PDF export? 

Any­way, I updat­ed the slides to PDF for­mat and also made some minor cor­rec­tions. I exchanged the font Human­ist 521 with Gill Sans. Appar­ent­ly the for­mer is an offi­cial clone of the lat­ter, and since Gill Sans is pre­in­stalled on a Mac any­way, I may as well just use the orig­i­nal. The met­rics also seem to look nicer in the PDF. I also copy-edit­ed some of the notes to be more edu­ca­tion­al than just a tran­script of my talk.

Here is again, the direct down­load link.

Down­load “FMX 2013 Slides PDF with Notes” fmx-11-revised.pdf – 1963-mal herun­terge­laden – 15 MB

Outbound link manager plugin is incompatible with QuickLatex

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I found the rea­son for why some­times all Latex in my posts got clob­bered. The cul­prit was an out­dat­ed plu­g­in, which—as a side effect—deleted back­slash­es from posts. So I dein­stalled the sin­ner and also repaired all math that I found was bro­ken. If you still find bro­ken math, drop me a line.

Followup to Atmospheric Scattering—Part 1: Overview

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This post is the first in a series to fol­low-​up on my 2012 GPU Pro 3 arti­cle about atmos­pher­ic scat­ter­ing [11]. What I showed there was a full sin­gle-​scat­ter­ing solu­tion for a plan­e­tary atmos­phere run­ning in a pix­el shad­er, dynam­ic and in real time, with­out pre-​com­pu­ta­tion or sim­pli­fy­ing assump­tions. The key to this achieve­ment was a nov­el and effi­cient way to eval­u­ate the Chap­man func­tion [2], hence the title. In the time since then I have improved on the algo­rithm and extend­ed it to include aspects of mul­ti­ple scat­ter­ing. The lat­ter caus­es hor­i­zon­tal dif­fu­sion (twi­light sit­u­a­tions) and ver­ti­cal dif­fu­sion (deep atmos­pheres), and nei­ther can be ignored for a gen­er­al atmos­phere ren­der­er in a space game, for example.

I have writ­ten a Shader­toy that reflects the cur­rent state of affairs. It’s a mini flight sim­u­la­tor that also fea­tures clouds, and oth­er ren­der­ing good­ies. A WebGL 2 capa­ble brows­er is need­ed to run it. Under Win­dows, the ANGLE/Direct 3D trans­la­tor may take a long time to com­pile it (up to a minute is noth­ing unusu­al, but it runs fast after­wards). When suc­cess­ful­ly com­piled it should look like this:
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Most Popular Posts and Tags

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I have added a per­ma­nent page with a sum­ma­ry of the most pop­u­lar posts on this blog. I also tried to add mean­ing­ful tags to all posts. Here are the most impor­tant tags:

Content type tags

  • down­load — a down­load is avail­able is this post
  • gem — a code snip­pet or oth­er copy-paste thing is available
  • math — posts that are heavy on math formulae

Topic tags