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Nvidia Sinks Moon Landing Hoax Using Virtual Light
schwit1 writes Using its new top-shelf graphics processing unit, Nvidia tackles one of the most persistent conspiracy theories in American history: the veracity of the 1969 to 1972 Apollo moon landings. From the article: "'Global illumination is the hardest task to solve as a game company,' Scott Herkelman, Nvidia's GeForce general manager, said in an interview. 'Virtual point lights don't do a bad job when the environment stays the same, but a game developer has to fake shadows, fake reflections...it's a labor-intensive process.' So when a Nvidia research engineer used the company's new dynamic lighting techniques to show off a side-by-side comparison between an Apollo 11 photo and a GeForce-powered re-creation, the company knew it had a novel demo on its hands. 'We're going to debunk one of the biggest conspiracies in the world,' Herkelman said."
You can point a strong telescope at the moon and see the tracks, footprints, and leftover hardware. It would have been more expensive at the time to send machines to false-place those articles of evidence on the surface. See for yourself, they are on the earth-facing side. Something NASA colt have saved money on if it was a conspiracy by claiming the landing was on the far side.
No, they demonstrated that the conspiracy theorists claims that the photograph was fake because there wasn't enough illumination given the position of the sun and lunar module are incorrect. The additional "light source" is the reflection off Armstrong's suit, and not some sound stage. The claim is "there's no possible way this could have happened", and they showed one plausible way, thus negating the assertion.
It was funny watching the video. You could see the engineers stoked about how they were showing interactively that they could faithfully replicate the moon landing.
Then they would be interspersed with some marketing drone who kept mentioning the company and technology by name, and how this type of stuff wasn't possible in the past and bla bla bla.
It's clear that for nVidia it was a marketing stunt by how many resources they put into it (it can't have been easy replicating every small detail from the moon landing), and it seems to have worked.
However, it's also really cool that they did something pretty awesome and worthwhile with the marketing budget instead of blowing it on regular ads.
This is the type of marketing I can get behind. Show me something interesting and cool, and promote science while you're doing it.