Yesterday I posted an animated eclipse implemented as a procedural texture, in honor of that day’s great celestial event. It’s not a movie clip — it’s a live simulation running on your computer or phone.
Interestingly, this eclipse simulation is actually something that I created exactly 40 years ago. In 1984 I introduced to the world what came to be known as procedural shader languages, in the course of which I created lots of examples.
One of those examples was this procedurally generated eclipse. Originally it ran in my own custom shader language. Then around 18 years ago I re-implemented it in Java. More recently I re-implemented it yet again as a WebGL fragment shader.
But the design and the algorithm has never changed. It’s the same procedural eclipse that I created back in April 1984. Except that back then it took 30 minutes a frame to compute. Now it just runs on your phone in real time, thanks to the wonder of Moore’s Law.
In another 40 years, I wonder what simulations will run in real time that now take half an hour to compute. I can hardly wait!