What would it take to have a really big canvas
to draw on, or to type a lot of text?
Nearly
Infinite
Drawing
Space
CRANKY MAN GOT INSANE - AGAIN
INFINITE Canvas?
I’ve always wanted a really big space for all my stuff. Drawings, notes, diagrams, maybe even entire books. Why should I have to decide
how big it is before I’ve put anything on it? Oh, I know why. Paper has edges.
But that’s what THEY want you to think.
If you know as much as I do, then you know for certain that Pippi Longstocking once drew a horse on the floor because it simply wouldn’t
fit on the sheet of paper she was given at school. (To be fair, it was a very big horse)
So why, in a drawing application, do I have to start by deciding that my canvas will be 3000 × 3000 pixels, only to discover two hours later
that I really should have made it 5000 × 5000?
What exactly is stopping us from just having a ridiculously large canvas? (Well, storage space, for one)
Pixels have to live somewhere. A 100,000 × 100,000 image contains a truly stupid number of them, and storing a gigantic empty bitmap
just in case you might someday draw something in the far corner is not particularly clever.
But what if pixels were just an unnecessary figment of your imagination?
A dot can exist at coordinate [1500, 1000]. It can just as easily exist at [20000, 40000]. Or [200000000, 400000000].
The computer doesn’t have an existential crisis because the number got bigger. And a line is just more dots living together.
This is what I was pondering one rainy afternoon while walking to buy carrots for soup. (That detail is completely unnecessary, but there
it is.) And then I realised that the interesting part of a huge canvas isn’t simply that you can draw an enormous horse without running out
of paper.
It also means you can export any part of the canvas at whatever resolution you need. That little doodle in the corner can become a
poster. Or a billboard. Or, if your ambitions are getting out of hand, something large enough to cover the Moon.
So I kept pondering. Then I started writing tests. Then the tests became an engine. And, as these things unfortunately tend to happen
around here, the engine became a project.
YOTTAPIXEL, Nearly Infinite Canvas. (Not mathematically infinite, just big enough for a galaxy horse)
WORKING TITLE
The craziest drawing application
Let’s zoom out far enough that we can finally see the edges of the document. Good. At this zoom level, one pixel on your screen covers
roughly 2.97 sextillion document pixels, and the entire canvas is about 2 septillion pixels wide and tall. (Plus or minus a few trillion, but
really, who is counting at this point?). The SI prefix for 10
24
is Yotta. So 2 x 2 yottapixels also works.
Now, septillion or Yotta is one of those units that technically means something while communicating almost nothing to a normal human
being. So let’s give it some scale.
At 96 DPI, one pixel is about a quarter of a millimeter wide. If we somehow displayed the entire 2-septillion-pixel-wide canvas at that
physical pixel size, meters become useless almost immediately. Kilometers don’t help much either.
2 septillion times 0.264 mm is 5.29166 × 10²³ mm or 529,166,000,000,000,000 kilometers
Which is about: 55,930 light-years.
In other words, light itself would take roughly 55 thousand years to travel from one side of your document to the other.
For comparison, the Milky Way is roughly 100,000 light-years across.
So YOTTAPIXEL’s canvas is only about 56% of the diameter of the Milky Way. See? Not infinite at all.
And because the canvas is square, its total area works out to roughly 40% of the area of the Milky Way’s disc.
If you very irresponsibly translate that into stars using a nice round estimate, we are talking about something on the order of tens of
billions of stars’ worth of galactic real estate. Which should probably be enough room for your drawings.
Open a new document, and the distance
from your cursor to the edge of the page is
greater than the distance from Earth to the
centre of the galaxy.
When you create a new document, there are no borders. Well, that’s not entirely true.
The canvas isn’t actually infinite and, as I’ll show you later, it does have borders. You just won’t be seeing them anytime soon. At this
zoom level you can pan for quite a while before the edge becomes even remotely relevant.
Apart from that small geographical oddity, it behaves like any self-respecting drawing canvas. You can paint with different brushes,
colors and transparencies. Nothing particularly strange there.
The squiggly line I drew before eats a few hundred trillion pixels itself.
2 Ypx
That’s about 300 million % zoom in
You might think this is basically vector software, and you’d be excused for thinking so. After all, a sharp point remains sharp even when
you zoom in to frankly ridiculous levels.
But YOTTAPIXEL isn’t limited to clean-shaved shapes. You can use soft brushes too, with transparency, feathered edges and all the fuzzy
mess you would expect from a drawing application. And you can of course erase those brush strokes with an eraser brush as well.
I enjoy having a few billion solar systems’ worth of space for doodles as much as anybody, but I also wanted text. Notes. Articles. Maybe
books. I don’t know. Why not? A Nearly Infinite Canvas should certainly be able to swallow a few books’ worth of text without
complaining. That turned out to be another interesting problem. Displaying text wasn’t particularly difficult. Keeping it fully editable while
allowing it to exist at completely ridiculous scales was.
How about the text?
Here are four entire copies of Pride and Prejudice, sitting side by side and pasted at different zoom levels. Every one of them is fully
editable.
And, naturally, if you zoom all the way into the A in the author’s name, there is another entire book stuffed inside it.
If we zoom out and fill the canvas with a soft brush we just covered 4×10^48 pixels. That’s 4 quindecillion pixels. Which feels like a
perfectly reasonable minimum requirement for Nearly Infinite Canvas.
Did you know?
But let’s step back
My best art to date
YOTTAPIXEL will continue
The Septillion Canvas Project
