Transsiberian Railway Trip as a Single Slitscan | Hacker News Reader

Transsiberian Railway Trip as a Single Slitscan

archive.section9.co.uk

127 pointsonidaito25 comments

Stanley Kubrick used a slitscan technique for the famous star sequence at the end of "2001: A Space Odyssey"

Here's the 2001 sequence reversed into normal pictures/patterns: http://seriss.com/people/erco/2001/

This is cool!

I love image processing/compression stuff, but I think I might be missing the point of this 'slitscan' approach - doesn't really seem to produce any kind of visually interesting effect.

I zoomed in full of anticipation but was disappointed to find it just looks like kind of.. noisy garbage. Am I missing something important here?

Well, the rail line runs through Siberia which is almost all wilderness. If you zoom in a lot, what was once noisy garbage starts to look like forest and grass.

It is one massive "panorama" of the entire trip. Processing them to look clean is tricky though/requires additional sensors.

Maybe you didn't zoom long enough? In the zoom level that you're expected to go, it looks like a series of thousands of photos, each of a point in the trip, taken with a cheap camera (with some noise, but not particularly distorted and far from "garbage").

You should be able to see the railway going on, places, stops, etc.

Click the 1:1 icon at the top left of the "map"

I've always wanted to do this, neat.

I bet you could regularize the horizontal dimension by scaling each pixel's width proportional to velocity (say via an interpolated GPS tracklog). As-is everything is either oddly compressed or stretched, depending on how fast the train was moving at the time.

That's exactly what I was thinking. If you leave a GPS logger running and make sure the time inside the camera is accurate, you could fix the scaling to match the train's speed and make it look a lot better.

Or, even cooler, change the framerate of the camera during the trip in real-time with the GPS speed as input. :-)

Kind of weird just taking the middle row of pixels. He mentions using a pano library at the bottom, so he could have just fed every frame into it instead of one row per frame and gotten a clear panorama instead of so much blurring and messes. The whole point of the pano library is to remove the dupe pixels, after all, something that didn't happen effectively with what he did.

Good pano software takes, like, a minute to stitch say 10 photos together, sometimes requiring manual intervention. At 30 fps, it would take 180 times as long as the journey to complete the stitch. He'd expect the results sometime in 2018.

> Kind of weird just taking the middle row of pixels.

That's kind of the definition of what a slit-scan is ;) Maybe they wanted that specific effect, maybe they didn't have the resources to do something "better" – part of the beauty of slitscans is how simple they are.

Beautiful. Can you go into more detail about your recording setup?

Very cool! Have y'all considered uploading the entirety of the original footage to Youtube?

Or even some torrent?

I don't think most people would want to download 200 gig of video just to get a glimpse of this.

why not? I've got a spare monitor to run as a realtime Trans-Siberian window view ;)

I'm a bit surprised there isn't already a video of the entire journey.

For example, there's a 5+ day long video of the entire Hurigruten route along the coast of Norway at http://nrk.no/hurtigruten/?lang=en .

I'm in the neighborhood and have been thinking about making the trip.

If anyone wants to fund a ticket and a camera (GoPro?) I'll make a video.

Based on some incredibly cursory pre-coffee googling, it would be about $1200 for the ticket (assuming you want a decent private-ish berth), probably around $500 for a GoPro and various equipment (a way to mount it on the window, spare batteries, chargers, memory, etc.) and somewhere in the neighborhood of $800 for the flight back (I wouldn't want to subject you to eight hours on an S7 flight.)

$2500 is a pretty reasonable goal to throw up on a crowdfunding website.

Good idea! I've never run a crowdfunded project, but this seems like a good use-case.

I just created a Kickstarter, let's see what happens once it's approved.

Google worked with RZhD to put a virtual ride on Youtube a few years ago: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/16/google-tran-sib...

The link to Google.ru 404s [1]. Does anyone know if this is a real 404 and this site is gone, or if this is Google's dumb idea at localizing content (they send 404s depending on how they think your IP represents your geo location ... for some reason).

1: http://www.google.ru/intl/ru/landing/transsib/en.html

Here's a previous discussion from when Google posted a seven day long video of the entire trip.