But, ignoring things like air resistance, the lower the thrust is, the more delta-V/energy it takes to escape?
For instance, if you had a rocket with a fixed delta-V and it used all of its energy almost instantaneously, say it escapes from Earth. But if you lower its thrust so that it is not accelerating upward (lower than the force of gravity), it could use the same delta-V without leaving the ground.
No, it’s the things you’re “ignoring” which keep it on the ground. A solar electric thruster provides less thrust than the surface weight of the spacecraft it is pushing, but it is nevertheless able to push a probe to escape velocity and beyond over months or years of continuous thrust.
It's somewhat similar to a Flash-only website, since it has less support and most notably lacks many of the features HTML makes easy (search engine indexing, browser search-and-find, ease of development, layout, and separation of content from style).
It works well on OSX 10.10 with an HD4000 in Firefox, Chrome and even in Safari. The "framebuffer not complete" warning looks like you're using an extension which isn't supported everywhere, probably OES_texture_float or WEBGL_depth_texture?
I just checked http://www.browserleaks.com/webgl on Win 7, and Firefox 30's ANGLE uses Direct3D 9, whereas Chrome's Canary (v38, best performance) uses Angle with Direct3D 11.
Firefox might upgrade this sometime, but Aurora (Firefox 32) still uses Direct3D 9.
Author here! It's very true that the GPU does the heavy lifting, although I'm not sure exactly where an "in the browser" line could be drawn (conceptually any page uses the browser as an execution engine and library).
It's a bit trickier due to restrictions in WebGL (OpenGL ES based) compared to the desktop (e.g. no bitwise operators makes it a pain to get randomness that doesn't bias the result), but it's basically the same.
Could you please list literature/papers that you found especially useful while making that renderer? I plan to do the same thing for education purposes.
Please let me know if you have any questions, (see my email at http://jonathan-olson.com/about), and please feel free to use my code however you like (things I wrote are MIT, but I use CC-by and CC-by-non-commercial HDR images).
If you're interested in ray/path tracing or photorealistic rendering at all I would seriously recommend Physically Based Rendering[1]. It's probably one of the most satisfying book purchases I've made. The authors go through every aspect of implementing a quality path tracer: image sampling, surface shading models, statistics and integration methods, intersection testing and acceleration and more. It's an absolute treasure trove of information. (Be prepared to do a lot of math.)
Seems like it might make people more likely to run into camouflaged obstacles (particularly those vision-impaired). Imagine running through a park at night with camouflaged electrical boxes.
I heavily agree with painting artwork on them. A few blocks away, there is a painted electrical box that I have become quite attached to.
I haven't seen it mentioned, but working for a university project funded by public and/or private grants (in my case for free educational software) is working quite well.
For instance, if you had a rocket with a fixed delta-V and it used all of its energy almost instantaneously, say it escapes from Earth. But if you lower its thrust so that it is not accelerating upward (lower than the force of gravity), it could use the same delta-V without leaving the ground.