Moo

lesbrarian goat gal

Online, I do a little bit of art and a little bit of web design. Offline, I'm a children's librarian!
Art credit: pfp
No kids, no racists, etc.


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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

A thing I've always been intrigued by: all recorded or transmitted moving pictures in history have been made up of discrete still images. Film is a series of still 35mm photos, and even analog video is only analog in a few of its dimensions; timewise, it's still strictly quantized. But this isn't necessary - we never needed to do it that way, it was just the only thing that made sense.

A single point of light can be measured, transmitted, and reproduced in a completely analog fashion with any of a number of methods, and nothing stops someone from focusing an image onto an array of single-point sensors and hooking the output of each one up to a matching lightbulb, LED, etc. at the other end of a cable. Except of course that it's incredibly impractical - before 20 years ago (and perhaps not even then) it would have been extremely difficult to get sensors small enough to achieve adequate resolution, and each pixel would require its own wiring. That's one million wires, minimum, to carry a standard def picture in full color.

This is hard, but not undoable. And if you did it in black and white, you're only talking about 345,000 wires, and if you did it at half resolution, it's even more reasonable. It could be done. And I think it would be very unsettling to look at.

There would be no time-quantization with such a display. You would have analog behavior on the time axis, pixel changes blending into each other completely fluidly. It would be like watching a 1000FPS video. What would it look like? Would we find out that we really can't see any faster than 120fps or 160fps or whatever? Or would it feel uncanny? This is probably how our eyes work; I think they do have a million little wires going into our brains. We don't have a "frame rate," but no matter how advanced your geforce is, every moving picture you've ever seen did. Maybe it would be terrifying to see a true wormhole, a window between two points in reality. There's only one way to find out.


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

I've been to the camera obscura tower in Edinburgh a few times, where mirrors focus an image of the streets outside onto a table in a darkened room. The little people walking around "down there" on the table seem so much more vivid than any video could be - I highly recommend the experience!

This is a fantastic thought. My contribution is that it would be lovely to both store and play back the video using a 3D object - additive when recording, and subtractive when playing.
People have used 3D objects for animation, but when playing them back, removing slices - discrete again.
You would need a continuous physical process on both sides.

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