NVIDIA's new GPU proves moon landing truthers wrong

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Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, there still exist some people on planet Earth who believe it's the only celestial body humanity has ever walked upon. You've heard it before -- the moon landing was a hoax, a mere TV drama produced by Stanley Kubrick presented as fact to dupe the Soviet Union into giving up the space race. This deliciously ludicrous conspiracy theory has been debunked countless times, but now its advocates have one more refutation to deny: NVIDIA's Voxel Global Illumination tech demo. It's a GPU-powered recreation of the Apollo 11 landing site that uses dynamic lighting technology to address common claims of moon-deniers, and it's pretty neat.

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Mark Daly, NVIDIA's senior director of content development told Engadget its Apollo 11 demo was created as an answer to Sponza -- a popular global illumination model frequently used in by the academic crowd. It's a good model, he says, but it's not very interesting to watch. "Jen-Hsun [Huang], our CEO, looked at it and said 'Isn't there something better?' Anyway, one of our research engineers happened to put this slide up of Buzz Aldrin on the moon in a meeting and said 'this speaks global illumination to me because of all the hoaxers and deniers of the moon landing." Conspiracy theorists say that Aldrin simply couldn't have been lit up the way he is in the picture. NVIDIA took it as a challenge.

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