In a small room tucked away at the back of Microsoft's E3 booth, developers behind the company's upcoming and now controversial Xbox One shared a tech demo created with the aid of NASA in an attempt to push the technical limits of what Microsoft's Geoff Henshaw calls the system's "pure horsepower."
The demo itself is largely the work of programmer Frank Savage who with a team began the experiment with the system by searching for a "giant set of data," says Henshaw. The goal: To see what is possible using the pure computational horsepower of the new console.
"So we went to NASA, because NASA has this really cool database. It has every single celestial body in the inner solar system, including planets, moons, asteroids, comets." says Henshaw. The result is a tech demo simulation of space based on out to 35 thousand light years of data which tracks the position, velocity and orbital trajectory of every single subset of asteroids between Mars and Pluto. Each of the 40,000 asteroids are calculated and rendered, presenting its time and place to a high degree of accuracy."
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