I took a step out of narrative to do this piece for the massive Illustrative Zurich exhibit which opens on Friday.
Floaters from David OReilly on Vimeo.
The actual piece is a seamless loop.
“Floaters are deposits of various size, shape, consistency, refractive index, and motility within the eye’s vitreous humour, which is normally transparent. They may be of embryonic origin or acquired due to degenerative changes of the vitreous humour or retina… Floaters appear as shadow-like shapes that appear alone or together with several others in one’s field of vision. They may appear as spots, threads, or fragments of cobwebs, which float slowly before the sufferer’s eyes. Since these objects exist within the eye itself, they are not optical illusions but are entoptic phenomena.”
After several requests (and people started producing this stuff without permission!), I opened a store where you can buy some Octocat merch. I did a few other limited edition designs for fun. Take a picture wearing this stuff and you win a prize.
Also, I’m a ‘Boards magazine “director to watch” this month, which actually has nothing to do with surveillance. It’s great to see them interested in stuff outside the commercial world.
These Octocat plush toys were made by Gina Beastly, she rocks.
Unexpectedly there’s been a lot of discussion about my Rotating Grid Illusion… It got on the front of the TED blog and since has been exhumed, examined, ripped apart and reassembled by many people from the science community. As with Octocat, it’s great to see people reinterpreting my work, especially since I don’t consider myself remotely scientific (or in the case of octocat - retarded). I’ve updated the original post here.
In light of all this discussion about optical illusions, I present my rarely seen Ident animation, the original short film which I now use as a logo. The effect you see in this is called a bistable percept, an image or shape that can be interpreted in 2 ways at once. In this case, a rabbit and a bird. Other examples of bistable percepts here and here.
Ive just finished coding an application for the iphone/ipod touch. It gives the illusion of a 3d hologram jumping off the screen.
Here’s a video of it in use, featuring the Cat from my award-winning but unfinished cartoon PSS:
The application works by assuming a constant viewing angle (35-45 degrees), typical for when the device is placed on a tabletop. The 3d scene’s perspective is warped using anamorphosis, the same technique used in Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors. This application does the exact same but updates dynamically.
The software uses the ipod’s built-in gyroscope to calculate rotation on the y-axis, so we can look around the environment around by turning the device, there are also controls for manual rotation with a slider on the left hand side of the screen.
My programming knowledge is limited, if any iphone developers want to collaborate on this stuff please get in touch!
David
*updated 7/10*
The following is an interesting example of Temporal Aliasing I discovered while working in 3d software.
A large grid seen rotating at a certain speed will appear to group itself into smaller grids, spinning independently.
In this example, we see a central grid, and 3 or 4 orbiting it. To prove it’s one grid, stand back from your monitor.
The illusion/effect has been picked apart by several sources, some intelligent professors and many more angry students have contacted me about it. MIT’s Fredo Durand gives probably the easiest to understand explaination:
You are trying to capture a motion that is too fast for the framerate you’re using. In the case of a spinning wheel, what happens is that the wheel might turn, for example, 350 degrees between two frames but your eyes interpret it as -10 degrees. A similar thing happens with your grid. At the periphery, the lines move by more than one grid cell between two frames and the resulting visible motion is “snapped” to the smallest possible motion. The correct way to prevent such artifacts is to make sure that the shutter of the camera is open during the full interval between two frames, so that motion that is too fast gets blurred.
Further detail by Professor Berthold Horn (also from MIT):
“Perhaps an illustration of how we seem to interpret rotational
motion as taking place about points near the center of the field of view,
if possible, or so it seems to me. As I move my gaze around,
I tend to pick up apparent rotations about points near the center
of the current view (where temporal aliasing permits).Reminds me of an apparent higher ability to detect symmetries in
patterns when the axis of symmetry passes near the center
of the field of view, or the center of symmetry is near the center of
the field of view.Could it be that circuitry for detecting symmetries is expensive and
would need to be replicated for different centers of symmetry?
Which might suggest that there is good circuitry for “central” symmetries.
Others are found or at least verified by shifting the gaze…
Perhaps something similar applies to rotational motion. Although,
we’re very good at picking up rotational motion from peripheral vision…”
Mathematician Cristi Stoica made this amazing one which has 2 centres.
and this, which has 4 centres…
he writes:
If we rotate the grid at each step with an angle of 360/n, the center is the only point containing all the time vertices of the grid (except, of course, the case when n=1, 2 or 4, when no rotation is viewed). But if we are good enough at math, we can modify the animation such that we obtain more than one fixed point….
The animation above is based on some properties of the number 65. This number plays the role of the hypotenuse in eight Pythagorean triples:
652=162+632=252+602=332+562=392+522=522+392=562+332=602+252=632+162.
Also:
Interesting discussions at reddit, abc science, bad astronomy
Japanese page with flash applications
Variations made by someone named Theeth (here and here)
seanaltogether created these interactive flash rotating grids: here and here
My original images:
Here there appear to be about 5 or 6 grids.
at a lower frame-rate it looks almost like liquid.