refractal

It will be interesting to see how, or if, this technology is used commercially. Encountering this perspective for the first time, before it has had time to absorb into one’s common place, certainly rings with a bit of the “oh cool” factor. The so-called “Direct Image Manipulation” has the effect of interrupting the way we usually interact with and conceive of video. The fulcrum shifts and we are presented with objects in motion almost more so than we are a sequence of images. The video becomes almost more of a captured reality than a photographic record (but, of course, thats what they used to say about photography).

You can download a video player from the project website that lets you manipulate any .avi video files in this way. The program itself seems to work pretty well after it scans the video file frame by frame, creating an index that drives its functionality.

A seperate project, created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, is able to create an entire “geometric context” [read also as a 3-d space] from a single flat image. Very cool, almost like the esper machine from Blade Runner. The project website can be found here.