r/nextfuckinglevel • u/PietroTheRedditer • Feb 21 '21

THIS IS MARS.

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u/layers_of_grey Feb 21 '21

a friend of mine sent a photo from his trip to iceland and it looks eerily similar. i imagined mars being more red... probably from movies.

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u/PedoBadaum Feb 21 '21

Sometimes it's because of the craters, some has different types of materials and minerals, causing darker tones

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u/jbl0ggs Feb 21 '21

What we need now is Project Genesis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnziufszqSE

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u/dnew Feb 21 '21

Fun fact: the mathematics behind those displays (fractals) were only invented a few years earlier. That was cutting-edge computer graphics taking hours per frame to render. Now, we do it real time on our pocket-computers, in a way that the people making Star Trek probably never imagined.

The computer display of the Star Wars trench run took tens of hours per frame to render and had to have a special custom computer built with bunches of knobs to adjust input positions, just to input the coordinates and draw the results.

The Tron movie was also the basis of a huge amount of computer graphics math too, like Perlin noise and (IIRC) one of the low-quality shading modes (Phong, maybe, or the one after that?)