7 ms·
PointerPointer: points to your cursor
- CountHackulus 14y agoThis is pretty neat, I wonder if it has to be human trained or if there's some sort of computer vision algorithm determining pointing.
- siim 14y agoAfter looking into to the code I found out that this app is made by using Voronoi diagrams. [1] The actual positions are saved in a json file. [2] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voronoi_diagram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voronoi_diagram [2]http://www.pointerpointer.com/gridPositions.json http://www.pointerpointer.com/gridPositions.json
- Groxx 14y agoDefinitely good for a chuckle. It helps a lot that the photos are very well aimed, really makes it feel magical :)
- pyre 14y agoThe images are adjusted. I was able to get the same picture 3 times in a row by moving cursor slightly, but the finger was always aligned exactly the same on the cursor, even though I had moved it.
- Inufu 14y agodoesn't really work for me with Chrome on Windows 7 - an image flashes for a split-second, then it's back to "Finding pointer" (I'm not even touching my mouse)
- simonbrown 14y agoIt seems to work for me when I move the cursor off the page, though that misses the point.
- AsylumWarden 14y agoSame here. Just flashes the picture really fast in the latest stable release of Chrome under Windows 7. Works beautifully in the latest Firefox though. Windows IE isn't supported at all apparently (I tried IE 9). Are the developers willing to share some insight into how this works? The picture selection is right on and there seems to be a good number of pictures at that.
- zentiggr 14y agoAgreed - never quite settles to actually show anything, just keeps asking me to hold still even though my hand's off the mouse...
- Inufu 14y agointersting: on Ubuntu 12.04, still with Chrome, it works
- LoneWolf 14y agoSame problem windows 7 x64 Chrome 19.0.1084.52
- jQueryIsAwesome 14y agoIt looks like Chrome is firing the "mousemove" event when it shouldn't. One way to make it work is to right click where you want it inside the square it and then left click anywhere outside the square. In the Javascript looks like the error could be patched in Flasher.js line 72; save the last event.clientX and event.clientY and then check if the mouse coordinates have actually changed.
- 14y ago
- hackNightly 14y agoJust wasted about 20 minutes of my life playing with this. I would really like to know the technology behind. Is there some sort of ML going on, or is this human trained? Either way, very entertaining and scary accurate.
- xd 14y agoYou wasted 20 minutes ... what makes you think someone didn't waste 20 days pulling the image collection together. Occam's razor ;)
- almost 14y agoAll the images are listed here: http://www.pointerpointer.com/gridPositions.json http://www.pointerpointer.com/gridPositions.json There are around 900 of them! I'd have used Amazon's Mechanical Turk... Very cool effect, I also wasted way to much time playing with it :)
- hoprocker 14y agoGood "point" -- the right question posted to mturk/crowdflower/etc. could have knocked out that json file for relatively minimum time/cost. Oh, the things we humans engage in.
- B-Con 14y agoThat's what I assumed. If I just moved my mouse a couple pixels I usually got the same pointing image back. I think they just divided it up into regions and then load the appropriate image for each region. However, if that's all they're doing, it seems odd that it takes so long to load... Maybe some of that's just a built-in delay to keep from constantly cycling images from someone who's bumping the mouse.
- colanderman 14y agoThe delay might be to build up suspense. The two–three seconds it spent loading I spent thinking "how could something that's essentially xeyes possibly take this long… ohhh haha very cute"
- DiabloD3 14y agoOn Firefox, never goes past "Pointer found, pointing". No image loads, works on Chrome though.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- runako 14y agoInteresting example of how a hard problem (image recognition/understanding) can be faked for some cases by solving an easier problem (lookup table, a few hours of manual intervention.)
- taylorbuley 14y agoSeeing http://www.pointerpointer.com/gridPositions.json http://www.pointerpointer.com/gridPositions.json really took away some of the magic for me. Still, very clever and shows that web magic can be in the eye of the mouse-holder!
- ma2rten 14y agoErm.. even there were some computer vision algorithm involved, he would probably want to run it offline.
- ajasmin 14y agoSo there's no advanced computer vision algorithms involved :(
- cocoflunchy 14y agoDoesn't load for me, on Chrome/FF/IE9...
- nik61 14y agoI'm getting nothing on Chrome beta (20). An occasional glimpse of a picture of two guys (?), assumed it was a silly joke...
- paulirish 14y agoI made a quick video explaining how the webapp works: http://youtu.be/Z2ZXW2HBLPM http://youtu.be/Z2ZXW2HBLPM Essentially, using the gridPositions.json to populate a Voronoi Grid (toggle display of the <canvas> in your browser). Then your cursor position is used against the grid to find which shape encloses it which maps back to the source JPEG which is then displayed.
- snowwrestler 14y agoI watched your video. It does not seem to explain how the fingertip position in each photo was calculated, which it seems to me is really the heart of the magic.
- Flam 14y agoHe says how it's basically a json file with every image mapped to coords of each voronoi "tile". I guess it was handmade in advance
- theon144 14y agoBut then, why do I get a picture of some garden when I move my pointer in the top right corner?
- gigawatt 14y agoYou can just barely see the tip of a finger coming in from the right in that one.
- snowwrestler 14y agoNot a bad guess but I'd be interested to actually know the details. Making it all by hand would be problematic for reasons beyond the sheer volume. How would one find a deep, diverse set of images of people pointing? How did the creators ensure they had images to cover all possible pixel positions within a certain proximity? It seems like it would take reviewing many more than 900 images to produce a final set of 900 that includes even coverage.
- ionforce 14y agoI don't see the point of this. The images load far too slowly.
- hanbam 14y agoI was actually expecting that somebody did some machine learning / matching over a large set of pictures and found all those images / coordinates.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- shashashasha 14y agoA faster (older) version of this by the same people, with camera flashes: http://flitser.org/ http://flitser.org/
- chousho 14y agoHaha, very clever. Although I seem to be running into problems whenever I put the mouse into one of the 4 corners of the screen. It can find anything more centrally located, though (apparently?)
- alpb 14y agoThere are serious problems around the upper right corner. I did not get any results from there. I'm wondering whether the pictures are originally pointing that coordinate or are they resized+translated to some offset?
- Geee 14y agoYou'll have to move the cursor left a bit, to get the same image, but with visible finger. The images are indeed offset so that in the upper right corner the finger actually doesn't fit in the frame.
- f0untain 14y agoAt one point, the finger was pointing straight to the screen, 3D detection of finger, is i think not possible without human sorting through images. I call it Amazon Mechanical Turk for image categorization.
- kephra 14y agoOne suggestion is to move the jquery from jquery.com to your domain for two reasons: 1: It will be one click less, for those who use noscript. 2: It will allow your site to survive the case that jquery.com changes anything, or goes down. Besides that its a nice toy.
- jdpage 14y agoAlternately, use the Google CDN.
- sporksmith 14y agoFun :). I did something similar with a bunch of photos of a stuffed monkey. I made a music video instead of an interactive web app, though the latter would probably not be too difficult since I wrote the software using Processing. http://sporksmith.wordpress.com/travels-of-code-monkey/ http://sporksmith.wordpress.com/travels-of-code-monkey/
- joshu 14y agoWhy does it take so long to load?
- apu 14y agoI was wondering the same thing. With a precomputed voronoi diagram and only a few hundred cells, lookups should be almost instantaneous.
- Inetgate 14y agoIs this a some kind of concentration game?
- jsilence 14y agoawesome!
- edwinyzh 14y agoWhat's this? I saw some pictures flashed after some loading indicators are shown...
- Andi 14y agoWhat is the point about this beyond showing pictures where the finger is next to my cursor? (Why is this popular?) It's not more interesting than a circumference search. You could implement that with a simple rtree.
- AznHisoka 14y agoHow can I get a pointer to my cursor in Javascript? I might find this useful in automating certain processes.
- gouranga 14y agoDoesn't work in IE9. That was the limit of my experience :(
- PidGin128 14y agoThis is technically interesting, but voyeur-istically creepy.