I stumbled upon the video for Moby & The Void Pacific Choir’s song “Are You Lost In the World Like Me?” a few weeks back and liked the animation. Artist Steve Cutts did a wonderful job creating the video and I thought a bunch of the scenes looked just perfect for turning into gifs. So that is exactly what I did. Enjoy.
Tag: gif
Zoom In. Now… Enhance! (For Real, Kinda)
The Zoom And Enhance trope has long been the ultimate criminal identification solution and a staple for crime drama television. Its use on screen is often lauded as an example of how Hollywood doesn’t understand technology. The Enhance Button trope simply ignores that the blurry focus and big blocky pixels you get when you zoom in close on an image are the only information that the picture actually contains, and attempting to extract more detail from the image alone is essentially impossible.
However, as a proof of concept, Alex J. Champandard’s Neural Enhance coding project uses deep learning to enhance the details of images. As seen from the gifs above, if the neural networks are well trained, the enhancements are quite effective.
Thanks to deep learning and #NeuralEnhance, it’s now possible to train a neural network to zoom into your images at 2x or even 4x. You’ll get even better results by increasing the number of neurons or training with a dataset similar to your low-resolution image. The catch? The neural network is hallucinating details based on its training from example images. It’s not reconstructing your photo exactly as it would have been if it was HD. That’s only possible in Holywood — but using deep learning as “Creative AI†works and it’s just as cool!
Now let’s vector in and enlarge the z-axis.
Snailed It!
I can’t decide if this gif from I created sneltopia video of a snail eating lettuce is cool or gross. Either way, it’s fascinating. To process food before it enters the esophagus, snails use a radula to crush it. This is a ribbon of flesh with very fine teeth which grinds the food like a very fine cheese grater.
The Camera Really Can Add Ten Pounds
It is commonly thought that the cameras can make you look heavier than you actually are. Dan Vojtech posted this gif on his blog that effectively shows how drastically the focal length of a lens can affect a subject’s shape, and thus its perceived weight.
To frame the face the same in each shot, the camera is close with the wide angle lens and farther away with the telephoto lens, so the GIF above shows what’s known as the “Hitchcock zoom†(or dolly zoom).
That’s one helluva long train!
Is this train entering the tunnel or leaving it? Actually, it doesn’t matter, with a little concentration you can change its direction just by thinking about it. Thanks to multistable optical illusions your thoughts create your reality.
The same effect is used to create these two spinning lady illusions.
Pluto’s Spinning Moons
Most inner moons in the solar system keep one face pointed toward their central planet, much like our own moon. This is called gravitational locking, or tidal locking. The gif above shows that certainly isn’t the case with the small moons of Pluto, which behave like spinning tops. Pluto is shown at center with, in order, from smaller to wider orbit: Charon (which you can see is actually tidally locked), Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra (which all spin).
The First Ever BMX Quad Backflip Has Been Landed
After months of trial and error, yesterday Jed Mildon landed the world’s first quadruple BMX backflip. The jump ended a heated, year-long, race between Mildon and James Foster to see who could land the trick first.
Outside a couple of K.O.s in the airbag during initial attempts, Jed Mildon pulled the trick off without injury, which is an especially monumental feat considering James Foster broke ten ribs and suffered a separated shoulder while training for his attempt. You can watch the official Nitro Circus video here.
via: Laughing Squid
Flying Through The Umbra Of A Total Solar Eclipse
During the recent total solar eclipse, a group of eclipse chasers chartered a flight to get a view of the event from 35,000 feet in the sky. The above gif was from the window of the plane flying through the shadow being cast by the moon on the clouds below. The image comes from this video taken by Stephan Heinsius.
