13 ms·
Inception Explained: a really cool scrolling animation of the plot
- kyasui 15y agoThis froze my entire computer (newish macbook pro) and and I had to restart. Also didnt have that much stuff open, anyone else?
- why-el 15y agoits a little laggy on my Firefox (I am running Ubuntu 11.04). Otherwise great idea.
- mrsebastian 15y agoYep, same, a little bit laggy under Firefox on Windows 8. (Odd; hardware acceleration should make this pretty nippy.)
- kyasui 15y agoWas using Chrome, I like the concept but didn't just crash my browser, crashed my entire machine. Ouch.
- corford 15y agoNo problems here but I'm on a beefy machine: FF11, 64 bit Win7, quad core i5, 8GB ram, SSD drive - frankly I'd cry if a website was able to slow/crash that.
- onemoreact 15y agoI use chrome on an 64 bit Win7, i7 2600K with 16GB ram and a 35/35 FIOS connection and plenty of flash sites slow things down to a crawl. Honestly, I cant help but wonder what exactly some developers expect people to use.
- corford 15y agoI don't think it's a question of what they expect. More like they have no idea how to program and Flash has let them get away with it. Seriously, there is no other sane reason why you should experience slow downs on a machine with that spec (assuming Flash can even harness most of that power).
- Avshalom 15y agolittle laggy in my firefox 11 on a 1.5G p4m with 512mb of ram. probably a just a bug.
- icebraining 15y agoSame here: only a bit laggy on FF10 on a 1.6GHz single-core CPU (2GB of RAM, though).
- rhplus 15y agoChrome.exe used 6% CPU while scrolling and 3% while not scrolling. This was on a 16 core machine! One of my cores hovered around 75% while scrolling and around 35% while not scrolling, which went down to zero when I closed Chrome.
- CWIZO 15y agoIt spins the fans on my i5 2011 air like there's no tomorrow, kinda like if I open a badly programed flash file. No crash though. And the whole thing is kinda slow when you scroll.
- tatsuke95 15y agoCoreTemp touched 90 degrees Celsius on my i7 Air. Visuals: Cool Performance: Hot
- Pewpewarrows 15y agoThis was really well done. I'd just like to point out a few things, as someone who's watched Inception way too many times: 1) It is never said that 3 levels is the maximum depth of a dream until Limbo occurs. My interpretation has always been that Cobb and Ariadne hooked up a shared-dream machine to Fisher's dead body, which brought them into Limbo. 2) Why are there 2 Limbos? There's the one Cobb and Ariadne follow Fisher and Mal into (which has the architecture of the Limbo that Cobb and Mal shared all those years ago). There's then the Limbo that Cobb and Saito share, where it looks like Saito architected the environment (Asian influences). And if they were the same Limbo, why was Cobb washed up on a shore with no memory of how he got there in Saito's Limbo? 3) In the Limbo that Cobb and Mal shared, all they needed to do was kill themselves to wake up. Why then was the defibrillator needed to wake Fisher up from death in Limbo to Dream 3?
- yabbadabbadoo 15y ago2) It's the same limbo. Based on Saito's look, it's been 'decades' since Cobb set out to find him, and actually found him. In that time, Cobb's memory of how he ended up there has faded. Meanwhile, Saito's been architecting his immediate environment (and that's all we see, we don't see anything else in the distance and if we did, my guess is that it would be the same 'skyline' Cobb and Mal architected). 3) The sedation is the difference. Cobb and Mal weren't sedated when they were in limbo, so killing themselves worked to wake them up. In this case, Fischer's under heavy sedation and dying wouldn't wake him up, even from limbo. Hence, the defibrillator was used to 'kick' him up from limbo to level 3.
- instakill 15y ago3) Which kind of proves that the plane was reality. If Fisher dies in limbo he'd wake up in real life (the level above the plane), not on the plane.
- sounds 15y ago3) Though the plane _is_ reality (in my opinion) Fisher could only have entered a dream without realizing it if: He was dreaming ever since Yusuf demoed the sedatives the first time, showing lots of people who dreamed all day (the "no, they come here to wake up" scene). Fisher tries to check his totem at that time but can't do it because he's trembling so bad. Thus, if he were under sedation, dying would not wake him, though my argument doesn't explain how he moved up multiple dream levels to the plane...
- marknutter 15y agoGreat way to make some quick cash via the affiliate link.
- user24 15y agoYou've been downvoted, but personally I feel that this is why this site is interesting. I do disagree that was a 'quick' way to make cash however. But the idea of producing an 'explained' website with a very nice and subtle affiliate link is excellently executed. I'd have thought the HN crowd would appreciate that.
- irishcoffee 15y agoAm I the only one who gets annoyed when people think inception was some stupid-deep, hard-to-understand movie? It was (I thought) very straight-forward. The bigger problems with the movie come from the plot holes pointed out by Pewpewarrows. Do those holes perhaps contribute to the confusion?
- Splines 15y agoI'll agree that the "follow-the-plot" infographics are too common (we don't need more than one), but the meta-issues are particularly interesting (and I think have all been discussed before). At first watch it's clear (apart from the ending sequence) what parts of the movie are dreams and what parts are reality, but when you watch it again you may start to consider that it's a little more fuzzy than that.
- outworlder 15y agoJoel Spolsky says that some individuals appear to have been born without the part of the brain that understands pointers and recursion. Maybe that's the case here?
- evincarofautumn 15y agoJoel Spolsky is as fallible as the rest of us. It’s very dangerous to mistakenly consider a skill an aptitude.
- wisty 15y agoMaybe. It might just be that some people tune out when the rules are explained. Sci-fi geeks won't (because we know they are important). If you expected Inception to be an action flick, you might tune out during the techo-babble (since it's often just an excuse for blowing stuff up) and not be able to unravel it.
- Androsynth 15y agoI haven't seen the movie, but reading this reminded me more of a state machine. It seems like it would be tough to keep track of 4 states at once and jump back and forth between them. (though it might be easier for engineers since we have been training these mental faculties more than most others)
- jacquesm 15y agoCheck out #5 for another illustrated version of the plot, and one that predates the movie: http://www.cracked.com/article_19021_5-amazing-things-invented-by-donald-duck-seriously.html http://www.cracked.com/article_19021_5-amazing-things-invent...
- huhtenberg 15y agoThis is even more confusing than the film :)
- caycep 15y agoSo how does this work in VMWare? :P
- jkrsna 15y agoCan someone explain how its done?
- picklepete 15y agoIt's powered by John Polacek's Scrollorama (http://johnpolacek.github.com/scrollorama http://johnpolacek.github.com/scrollorama) jQuery plugin.
- jeffthebear 15y agoIf you want to go deeper: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ginQNMiRu2w http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ginQNMiRu2w
- swang 15y agoWhile these scroll sites are pretty cool... I don't know if its the javascript library or maybe that is the affect the site's creator wanted but it doesn't feel smooth. Maybe because of the scroll speed the animations have fewer frames to animate which makes it look choppy? I'm not sure.
- jfarmer 15y agoI found if you use the mouse scrollwheel rather than the keyboard it was much smoother.
- swang 15y agoI was using my mouse scrollwheel though... :(
- eric-hu 15y agoI had the same feeling. I actually switched over to a wheel mouse because I tried using this on an Apple touchpad and it was not a happy animation. I'm pretty forgiving about the smoothness though. Scroll pages like this are still uncommon and it seems nontrivial to refine the scrolling to the point where it feels smooth and natural. I would not have the same expectation for an FPS or side scrolling game put out by a studio.
- Jabbles 15y agoPerhaps someone here can explain something that has annoyed me since I saw Inception. Falling (accelerating under gravity) is meant to "wake you up". Whilst falling you feel weightless - almost by definition (if you and the weighing machine are accelerating in sync, you apply no pressure to it). For some reason falling causes the loss of gravity in the dream world, and there's that whole scene about "recreating gravity". But since falling is indistinguishable from being weightless, what is stopping the dreamers from waking up? And why does weightlessness only go one level down? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weightlessness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weightlessness
- natep 15y agoBecause it's not the falling, it's the jolt of landing. When in free fall, you are not actually accelerating. In terms of landing, though, it doesn't matter if you hit the ground or if, say, the bottom of an elevator hits you.
- Jabbles 15y agoI haven't seen the film since it came out, so I may be mistaken. Didn't Cobb demonstrate to Ariadne that you wake up when you sense yourself falling? By tipping Arthur's chair over as he was dreaming? Arthur (if it was that character) didn't fall on the floor, there was no jolt. Also, doesn't the van land in the water, and no one wakes up?
- natep 15y agoAccording to the Inception Wiki, we're both right. > One method used to awaken from a dream within a dream is called a "kick", which is the sensation of falling, hitting water, or a sharp jolt that can startle the sleeper awake. Although I still think it's terribly inconsistent, if the details matter. There's too many different kicks with too many subtle differences and similarity for me to go into in a reasonable-length post.
- natep 15y agoOK downvoters, you're right. In the movie, they explain that a kick is the feeling of falling. So why didn't Cobb wake up when he was falling towards the water, but after he fell in? My guess is that the water invaded the dream and he drowned, and exited the dream via death. But they called that a kick, too. As we've seen, the movie is hardly straightforward. And if one of you had bothered to comment "they say in the movie that it's the feeling of falling" then I wouldn't have had to rewatch half the movie.
- irrationalfab 15y agoOut of curiosity, does anybody have an estimation about how much money the link (which I assume to be affiliated) may generate?
- jordan0day 15y agoThe "Buy the DVD on Amazon" link? My guess would be: not much.
- mrmagooey 15y agoNot enough to warrant the massive increase in page load time that all of Amazon's crappy affiliate code produces.
- kreek 15y agoThe first illustrated version of Inception is here http://disneycomics.free.fr/Ducks/Rosa/show.php?num=1&loc=D2002-033&s=date http://disneycomics.free.fr/Ducks/Rosa/show.php?num=1&lo...
- sukuriant 15y agoThe webpage is very garbled in IE9
- franze 15y agoi get a spammy access-restriction warning (see screenshot: https://img.skitch.com/20120321-86btw83e3gcnea6x4prr8wcj75.png https://img.skitch.com/20120321-86btw83e3gcnea6x4prr8wcj75.p... )
- jsnell 15y agoI don't understand how this is a "cool animation". In both Chrome and Firefox it does nothing by default. Pressing up or down moves the page by a single (useless) frame. Pressing page up or page down moves it by some random number of frames. Again totally useless, since it often ends up in a middle of some fade-in or fade-out. The scroll wheel is no better. Nor the scroll bar. What am I missing? The content might be interesting, but it's impossible to tell since this might be the worst way of presenting data I've seen this year. Which is quite an achievement, congratulations :-)
- icebraining 15y ago"Space" mostly works here, although the frames don't come off well aligned.
- callmeed 15y agoSo does the top stop spinning or not!?
- georgieporgie 15y agoYes. The closing shot shows the top growing unstable and, in the instant before the screen cuts to black, you hear the grinding sound of the top beginning to topple. At every non-reality point in the film where the top is spinning, it does so with no destabilization. Of course, it's possible that someone replaced his top (he wasn't very careful about concealing it and, let's face it, it's not rocket science to realize that it just needs to topple to indicate reality), but that's a different story.
- parfe 15y agoMal either died or kicked up a level. She used the top as a totem, not Cobb, and multiple people knew the properties of it. The top could not measure dream or reality while in Cobb's possession. His own dreams would render that totem useless.
- gadgetdevil 15y agoIt's a red herring. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ginQNMiRu2w http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ginQNMiRu2w
- lurchpop 15y agothat's probably really cool on a fast computer.