Nvidia staged a scientifically sound recreation of Apollo 11's 1969 moon landing at Game24, using global illumination to deliver definitive prove that astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong did, in fact, walk on the surface of the moon.
Game24 is a Nvidia-sponsored event that delivers 24-hour live streams of content from several world cities, such as Los Angeles and London. Game24 is a great opportunity for Nvidia to show off its latest tech and a recreation of the Apollo 11 moon landing proved to be a solid medium to showcase some of its technological muscle.
Before the demonstration, Scott Herkelman, Nvidia's GeForce general manager, proudly announced that Nvidia was about to debunk one of the biggest conspiracy theories in the world.
"Global illumination is the hardest task to solve as a game company," said Herkelman. "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."
Nvidia's new voxel-based global illumination (VBGI) algorithm accurately reflects light and creates shadows. Nvidia's new GTX 9xx series of GPUs features the Maxwell architectures, which house the VBGI algorithm put on display during the company's demonstration of the Apollo 11 mission.
"Thanks to Maxwell, our demo team rebuilt the scene of the moon landing in Unreal Engine 4, a game engine developed by Epic Games," says Nvidia. "They simulated how the sun's rays, coming from behind the lander, bounced off the moon's surface, and Armstrong's suit, to cast light on Aldrin as he stepped off the lander."
VBGI breaks down each object in a scene into voxels, 3D pixels, and determines how each one receives and reflects light from any source. With Armstrong's suit appearing to reflect light while the astronaut stood in the shadow, conspiracy theorists have suggested spotlight and other artificial light sources were used to create the moon landing at a location on Earth.
"[Our demo team] could reproduce how that light illuminated Aldrin as he stepped onto the moon's surface at the exact moment Armstrong snapped his photo," says Nvidia. "Inside a shot cited by Apollo 11 skeptics, [Mark Daly's demo] team had uncovered hidden evidence that the mission was real."
Nvidia says its demonstration also debunked another angle conspiracy theories had presented, the absence of stars in the sky during the landing.
"The reason the stars aren't visible is the exposures in the camera are set to capture the scene on the moon's surface," Daly says. "But they're there. And our demo team was able to find them by digitally changing the exposure on the shots to reveal them."
Take a look at Nvidia's work here:
