10 ms·
Every Unicode character shown once per frame as a 33-minute movie
- pavel_lishin 16y ago"Oh, neat, I found where the Asian characters begin!" And then they never ended.
- billybob 16y agoTime?
- pavel_lishin 16y agoI clicked ahead randomly.
- martin_k 16y ago+1 What a great way of making yourself feel a bit more insignificant and smaller.
- pavel_lishin 16y agoOr you could feel proud of yourself for speaking a language - a meme - that was sufficiently virulent to overtake most others.
- train_robber 16y agoSadly, my 'meme' isn't there on the video. Helvetica doesn't like my language I guess.
- rick_bc 16y agoNo, it should make you feel proud -- understanding the world through 26 (or other small numbers of) alphabets. (Speaking as an asian.)
- fedd 16y agoi personally think it's not very correct to call hieroglyphs characters and assign each of them a code. i may be wrong but i think that there is an growing number of hieroglyphs as there is an infinite (growing) number of words; and every h. consists of more primitive parts - i think they should be coded so that the sequence of primitives would form a hieroglyph like in european languages letters form words
- andos 16y agoYou really mean hyeroglyphs? Or ideographs/ideograms?
- fedd 16y agohm, seems the terminology has changed since i was trying to invent the chinese keyboard in childhood. we used to call the chinese characters hieroglyphs (characters that represent the bigger notions like words or parts of the word), as opposed to letters (characters that represent the sounds). now i see in wikipedia that they are called sinographs and contain of ideograms. my idea was to split the chinese character to the most primitive strokes like horizontal, vertical, diagonal strokes, squares, commas etc. i dont know, they have keyboards in china, and they are not that big. do they let to input sounds and then choose from several chars that sound like the input, or implement my childish idea?
- chc 16y agoBoth systems are used, though the shape-based methods use a more sophisticated granularity than simple strokes (for example, there is one component consisting of a diagonal stroke, three horizontal strokes and a square). Relevant Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_computers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_compu...
- andos 16y agoOn western keyboards, Japanese is typed using an input method. Basically, you spell the words using a phonetic convention and the computer guesses what sinograph you meant: you type zitensha, press space, and it hopefully becomes 自転車 (bicycle). Because each of zi, ten, and sha could be the reading of any of multiple characters the computer might guess wrongly. It works pretty much all the time, though. There are also Japanese keyboard layouts featuring all the 51 syllables (besides the latin alphabet). You just type the syllables, there's no phonetic convention, just the guessing game. I don't know how it works for Chinese, though. It's probably the same, I guess. I know that on Mac OS X one can draw the characters with the finger on the touchpad.
- BasDirks 16y agoStrangely beautiful.
- Rondrak 16y agoIt is, isn't it? I found myself thinking, "I'll just watch for a minute to see what this is", then getting lulled in until a distraction broke my reverie.
- BasDirks 16y agoSee also: http://www.youtube.com/user/ffoitl#p/a/u/1/gGiENL4XrjE http://www.youtube.com/user/ffoitl#p/a/u/1/gGiENL4XrjE
- Vivtek 16y agoFantastic! What is the sound and how was it generated? It sounds like it might be narrow samples of some voice.
- pavel_lishin 16y agoSounds like random binary data - in fact, I bet the audio is generated the same way as the video.
- kilovoltaire 16y agoIt gets higher and higher pitched as the video goes on, so may have to do with the unicode values. But too jumpy to just be that.
- andos 16y agoYou're probably right. Not all values have been assigned a glyph yet.
- JonnieCache 16y agoIt is a computer voice saying each character, timestretched to a fraction of their original length, likely the fraction needed for the longest one to fit into one frame. I've wasted a lot of time messing around with different sound sources in granular synthesis, and the timbre it produces is unmistakable. You get a similar effect fast forwarding an audio book, depending on the software. EDIT: maybe I spoke to soon, upon further inspection it seems to go up in pitch much too linearly with time. It's definitely a voice synthesis algorithm though, or perhaps one of those synthesisers that use parts from those algorithms to make musical sounds. EDIT2: I think it may be the voice algorithm reading out the character code, with the pitch set to the code * some constant. The jumps in pitch are from when there is a run of undefined codes. Higher numbers take longer to say, so the sound becomes more continuous as it goes on.
- stretchwithme 16y agoThey say characters are the most important element of a story.
- chrischen 16y agoThey're the most important element to a movie, especially this one.
- fishtoaster 16y agoI'm curious how the audio was generated. It seems to be somewhat dependent on the character being displayed, as evidenced by jumping between different types of characters (basic letters vs japanese characters)
- coderdude 16y agoI'm surprised that I was able to perceive individual characters. At the beginning when the movie is displaying the alphabet it seems like I can see each letter. Is this really one character per frame (assuming playback at 24 frames per second)? Edit: 49,571 (characters) divided by 25 (frames per second) comes out to 1,982.84. 1,982.84 seconds is 33.03 minutes. Taking into account the padding at the beginning and end of the video reveals that the video displays 1 character per frame at 25 frames per second.
- chc 16y agoThis is why there's a push for high-FPS video — 25 FPS is really too slow to look smooth without a lot of blurring or an audience that's very willing to overlook slight flicker.
- jerf 16y agoSome people adapt this into a system they claim helps speed read [1], and while I don't particularly believe the speed reading claims it is true that you can actually read quite quickly with words flashing at fairly high rates. There are various sites online that can help you play with this, but I can't get any of them to work on the machine I'm posting this on (no Java, zapreader.com doesn't work for unknown reasons). [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Serial_Visual_Presentation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Serial_Visual_Presentatio...
- sliverstorm 16y agoI could buy the speed reading claims, perhaps at slightly slower rates. One of the cool things about language and our brains is you can miss letters and get order mixed up, and instantly guess what was meant with a very high rate of success. Emxalpe: I persmue you sitll udnr snatd tis?
- Rondrak 16y agosliverstorm, I don't want to take this too far off topic, but what are the rates you're hearing of that you have trouble believing? I read at a little over 1,300 words per minute (and I keep getting faster). As to comprehension, without taking a test it's hard to say, but by reading a section of material for a few minutes, writing down everything I can remember without looking at the book, then re-reading to see what I've missed, I seem to get roughly 80% comprehension, which I find acceptable for most things (and it keeps getting better through practice). Disclaimer: That's depending on the material, I read at about half that rate (around 600 wpm) if it's extremely technical or dense, or a good deal faster in anything at or below a high school reading level.
- sp332 16y agoIt's not every Unicode character, just the ones in Helvetica.
- syncsynchalt 16y agoOnly shows the Basic Multilingual Plane, when does the first sequel come out?
- fedd 16y agou vee double u ex wye zed now we know the alphabet
- charlesju 16y agoThis video would be a lot cooler with some good background music.
- artfail 16y agoWhere were you guys in 2009? http://vimeo.com/7489601 http://vimeo.com/7489601
- biot 16y agoI was really hoping to see things ordered by closeness of one character's shape to another so that as it plays it looks like something organic growing and moving around. I'll buy a beer for the person who creates that video.