fjord.style is the web site of visual technologist Peter Richardson.
Supplemental re-entry. Once in high school I accidentally called Mexico with a modem. Somebody answered through the speaker: “Bueno? … Bueno?” I said “Sorry” and disconnected, but my dad found the charge on the phone bill and took the modem away. My first internet experiences were on BBSs, which were long-distance phone calls from Alaska for me then. There weren’t many. Eventually a local gateway…
Still thinking about place. I’ve been heads-down for a few years, as we all collectively got the wind knocked out of us by history, but I’m trying to come up for air more regularly. If we met previously, it was likely in New York. I’ve since moved to the edge of the woods by the ocean in the Pacific Northwest, which is my native biome, and I haven’t been back east or nearly anywhere else in years.…
This is a continuation of Going Into Depth , examining the construction of a custom parallax shader in WebGL, doing something I've wanted to try forever. There will be math, but also pictures, and isn't that the best case scenario? * I’m putting an asterisk up here to mean “It’s more complicated than that.” Feel free to refer to this note wherever you see another asterisk below. Mind Games Making…
This post describes a variation on parallax mapping that I used for a recent project , with detailed examinations of the rationale and a breakdown of the technique in the abstract. Most 3D objects rendered by computers are defined as hollow shells, a collection of zero-thickness surfaces, describing empty volumes. But the world is full of solids, each with its own inner life of nooks and crannies,…
I’m tired of reading long articles, so I’m going to write this one like a progressive JPEG. It might still be long, but maybe it won’t feel that way. Anyway, it’s about third-party libraries, open-source software, and GPUs. There’s a prize at the bottom. I made a WebGL demo with my 9-year-old called The Gem Collector ! It was mostly an excuse to try some new techniques and learn some new…
I and all my northern european ancestors, who would not offer you food, apologize in advance for the shocking self-absorption, but I’ll be writing autobiographically. If it helps, it’s going to include making mistakes and robot battles, and I imagine it’s going to go off the //rails pretty quickly. Firstly, and for what it’s worth: I’m an artist, and the son of an artist. I write the way I sketch…
~ What does a Design Technologist do? ~ Most of my work in the last ten years has been focused on rapid prototyping using off-the-shelf web technologies in new or unusual configurations, to explore potential product landscapes. I’ve worked with product, engineering, research, and design teams to solve interesting problems across a wide array of industries, most recently in digital cartography and…
“Generalization” is a term used in cartography to describe reducing the complexity of data while preserving its essential characteristics in a meaningful way. It’s not just simplification, but finding and revealing the most important details. It’s a useful skill when you have more information than you need, and that’s almost always the case. Cartographers can learn to recognize significant details…
I’ve been spending a lot of time over the mountains of Northern California lately. To view mountains from above is to journey through time itself: over ancient shorelines, the trails of glaciers, the marks of countless seasons, and the front lines of perpetual tectonic struggle. Fly with me now, on a tour through the world of elevation data: ( These maps are interactive! Open full screen ➹ ) If…
Like most web mapping services, the Tangram library draws maps in the “ Web Mercator ” projection. This projection has its benefits, but it’s certainly quirky. Mercator projections are well-known for their distortion at high latitudes – this is because they place the north and south poles at positive and negative infinity, which means a Mercator map of the whole world would be infinitely tall. To…