5 ms·
Pointer Pointer (2012)
- pjerem 1y agoThis one is an old one. I still love it, now with nostalgia. I always wondered how they got all those pictures. It looks like there is a recurrent theme tho.
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- dlenski 1y agoIt's fun indeed! The theme seems to be something like "college students at house parties"… reminds me very much of my friends and the photos we took at around this age.
- kilroy123 1y agoI too felt a ton of nostalgia for this one. I recently featured it in my newsletter: https://randomdailyurls.com https://randomdailyurls.com. If you're into this kind of stuff there's lot of new and old gems.
- ajoel24 1y agoSubscribed! Thanks for creating this newsletter.
- JRCharney 1y agoCan you make a version with cats in it? Like cats jumping at the cursor or trying to catch the cursor with their paws.
- eknkc 1y agoSince this is old, I assume someone found these photos and then manually selected the pointer location. Maybe used openCV or something like that.. But I'd most likely go with manual. There are 700+ images defined in https://pointerpointer.com/new-positions.json https://pointerpointer.com/new-positions.json and the script finds the closest match to the current mouse pointer.
- sky2224 1y agoYeah probably. It likely made it significantly easier given that the images are always super zoomed in, so a single finger pointing covers roughly 6-8 mouse pointer locations (I'm kind of eye-balling it here).
- GuB-42 1y agoThe images are also shifted to match the mouse pointer exactly, easier to notice near the edges.
- 1-more 1y ago710. Did a binary search on the URLs. Didn't look at the JS, whoops.
- tomjakubowski 1y agoYou often don't even have to read any JS to find these things. Check the network tab, maybe filter by application/json.
- 1-more 1y agoJS as a synecdoche for JS and everything it requests. I may be the only person who says that. I may be asking you to read my mind. Unfair. Ah well.
- atoav 1y agoI think this was created by the people at the art collective of monochrom.at, This is where I have seen this the first time ca. 2006. Edit: Now that I searched for it I only found their project ZeigerPointer, where they collect such images, maybe I mixed it up.
- SeanAnderson 1y agoThis is apparently from 2012, but I could've sworn it was older than that.
- Sesse__ 1y agoI thought so, too, but I checked my IRC logs and it was discussed in 2012–2015 but never before that.
- yapyap 1y agogood old web2 fun
- JimDabell 1y agoAlong similar lines: > On May 4th, 2007, we asked internet users to help isolate Michael Jackson's white glove in all 10,060 frames of his nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean. 72 hours later 125,000 gloves had been located. wgt_data_v1.txt (listed below) is the culmination of data collected. — https://www.whiteglovetracking.com https://www.whiteglovetracking.com
- agys 1y agoThis is an old project by Studio Moniker (Amsterdam)… I was once at a presentation of their work at Resonate in Belgrade (memories…) and they explained that the slight delay before the reveal of the underlying image is added artificially to add a bit of drama. Btw, the correct image is loaded through a Voronoi diagram.
- throwaway127482 1y agoConspiracy theory: that explanation is a lie, and the real reason for the delay is that it helps hide the fact that there isn't a unique image mapped to each pixel. If you click two pixels very close together, it shows the same image, but slightly shifted to exactly match your pointer. If the images were displayed immediately, it would be much more obvious what's going on.
- muzani 1y agoI'm surprised how well this works on mobile. I thought the photos would be distorted at least.
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- petercooper 1y agoPaul Irish explained the basics of how it works here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2ZXW2HBLPM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2ZXW2HBLPM I wonder if you could create something similar nowadays using generative AI but with the finger in a very specific location without pregenerating thousands of images.
- syx 1y agoVery interesting explanation, I've always wondered how it was built, I didn't know Paul Irish made a video about this. Thanks for sharing!
- slmjkdbtl 1y agoHow do they acquire these images?
- Sohcahtoa82 1y agoProbably harvested from MySpace and Facebook.
- keepamovin 1y agoThis is hilarious. I thought it was gonna be one of those pointer animation nightmares, and I was going to regret clicking on it, but I still kind of wanted to click on it anyway. But actually, it’s really funny and amazing to think about how you created it.
- senfiaj 1y agoHow does it work? Does it contain all the possible images with al the possible pointer positions? Does it do some corrections, such as rotation or shift to the original image?
- TealMyEal 1y agoIt's funny, im sure to Millennials this is jsut some nostalga to a simpler internet but I find seeing old dorm rooms and random slices of life from more than a decade ago really intresting, from the fashion to the red eyes from the flash. half of these photos look like they could appear on a modern Lo-Fi album cover
- kevstev 1y agoI thought the same. It made me wonder where they sourced the photos from, almost looks like they sourced it from webshots or a similar site in the mid 2000s. It was nice to see people just being caught in happy moments, and made me realize how much "content" on social these days is so highly curated and posed.
- dack 1y agoI didn't like that there was a long delay after you move your mouse, and since all the calculation happens on the frontend, i figured you could easily make it ~instantly update and follow you around. So i (well, claude) made a version that does that and i think it's more fun. here's the code you can paste into the console at pointerpointer.com: https://pastebin.com/f7YqQNxg https://pastebin.com/f7YqQNxg
- internetguy 1y agothis is pretty cool, it seems they reuse every image by translating it a little when your cursor is within a range
- lacoolj 1y agoMildly too addicting for me Gotta get back to work
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- abdullahsai 1y ago[dead]