Zoomquilt 2 (2007) | Hacker News Reader

Zoomquilt 2 (2007)

zoomquilt2.com

231 pointsshlomir63 comments

I was a big fan of the original zoomquilt. This one is even more incredible. It gives me the same vibes as The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch.

Definitely some Dali vibes [1] in there too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Persistence_of_Memory

Anyone get a weird optical illusion after watching this? All the text on my screen looks like it zoomed a way for a few seconds

Yes!

It is probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_aftereffect

Every time HN posts Zoomquilt I want to comment about the Amiga demo from 1997: Captured Dreams by The Black Lotus. It was one of my favorites back then, here's the same effect running on good ol' m68k (music warning):

https://youtu.be/jI8aVV8QIJ0?t=91

Seeing that running live at the time must have been incredible.

Thanks for posting this, haven't seen it before! Original author of the Zoomquilt here. Also noticeable is the Eames' movie Powers of Ten https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 and a similar movie Cosmic Zoom, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgfwCrKe_Fk. They are both from 1968 and both based on a childrens book about the relative size of things in the universe, to my knowledge the first implementations of an infinite zoom effect.

Reminds me of seadragon images circa 2006, which was, among other things, rolled into silverlight as 'Deep Zoom' images. There isn't much to show for it these days, but for an older opensource js implementation [1].

[1] https://openseadragon.github.io/

I’ve used these libraries a lot over the years building interactives in museums and it’s a shame they aren’t used more widely.

Thanks openseadragon devs

“Enter the Zoom world, leave reality for a while” should be the subject line for most meeting invites

That's really badass, would def be interested to see the workings of this masterpiece

Lol, the Sonicwall appliance at work blocks this as "Cult/Occult". :D

Why would that even be blocked?

idk - the old IT admin had activates this and till today nobody has even bothered...

...but what caused way more trouble was the situation where the blocked all "alcohol" related sites and within five minutes he had a note from one of the CEOs... :D

Lol good to know. Original author here. I very occasionally get strange emails from people with mental health problems who are overly fascinated by it, as well as Google Play reviews accusing it to be "evil and demonic". I later created http://arkadia.xyz/ for a much more wholesome experience. The stuff in the first Zoomquilts is just fantasies of all the illustrators who participated back then, I assume there really was no evil intention :-D

If there would be no date, I would think that it's the newest GAN achievement.

Yep, this was what 2020 felt like, mostly.

Does anyone else notice that, after staring at this for a minute or so and then coming back to HN, that you experience a lingering (reverse) zoom optical illusion effect?

Now - reading the comments after watching this for a while - it feels like the comments is zooming away from me.

I did something like this years back with the original oculus sdk, it was really fun to tie it to fov.

Would be curious to hear more about what you did. Would you share it with me? Always thought about trying something with VR and the Zoomquilts.

UP/DOWN to navigate is useful

SPACE to Pause.

Only 88 images later it repeats

Recent and related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25191802

The amount of art created for this project is quite impressive.

How can I be this good to build this? Author please tell me.

Open this site with an 8k display, turn on screen recorder, go fullscreen, make a seamless edit and put it on a site.

Alternatively try doing `npm install zoomquilt`.

This is incredible! Kudos for building it!

Does it end? How did you create it..?

Not the creator, but this was created 13 years ago.

It seems like it is about 8 scenes that spawns the next scene in the vanishing point of the current scene.

If you click anywhere a sidebar appears where it says "An infinitely zooming painting created in 2007".

Here's a comment from the author, and a conversation that explains how this was created: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25192569

Maybe this provides an interesting point of comparison between two different eras of web development. Zoomquilt 1 [1] was created 16 years ago, in 2004. I sometimes see people bemoan modern development as being inefficient, and in this this case it really seems to be true. When I view Zoomquilt 1, the framerate is steady and CPU usage low. When I view Zoomquilt 2, Firefox spins up to 100% CPU use, the fans start going, and the framerate is somewhat choppy.

And as far as I see, the functionality of both is the same. Sure version 2 may have higher resolution images and some hue transformations, but surely 16 years of hardware improvements can handle that without consuming a whole core.

Morning moan over. Also, this is first and foremost a piece of art, and this comment shouldn't take away from that. I just think this is an interesting comparison that is relevant on HN.

The website says "ZOOMQUILT 2 An infinitely zooming painting created in 2007" (Version 1 is from 2004) and on both pages it says "A project by Nikolaus Baumgarten". So it doesn't seem to be the case that we compare two eras of web-dev here.

Indeed, the original was in Flash, it was only ported to canvas much later.

I can't even notice the load on the system - Chrome's task manager tells me it's using 10% CPU, and I'm running on a 4k monitor.

EDIT: just tested with Firefox on MacOS and it's incredibly choppy and CPU-hungry. the `drawImage` call always goes over budget for RAF, there are a ton of open issues about it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1602299

Drawing at half scale gets it back to 60ms with time to spare:

    window_w = w * dpr / 2;
    window_h = h * dpr / 2;

Seems fine on Safari for me.

60fps*

It uses 17-25% CPU with Chrome, 4k fullscreen, 60fps and I use a Dell XPS laptop.

that's tons since for windows 100% is all virtual cores utilized. If the machine is 4 cores/8 threads - that's one full core.

Big deal. That's literally why you've got 3 more cores.

With that logic, you can never run more than 4 applications at once. The point is that for what it does, it shouldn't even be close to utilizing a full CPU core on a modern machine.

Well, for that matter, for what it does, it shouldn't even exist.

Huge deal not everyone is running 4 cores.

Core i5 first generation came out in 2009 with 4 cores: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i5_processo...

Even with the 3 extra cores for most laptops it means thermal (or power) throttle and likely high memory and cache pressure.

I'm not sure what's going on, but I opened it in Chrome on a 5 year old PC and had no fans going, no choppy framerate, no nothing. I probably could have left it open forever and never noticed.

It’s smooth as silk on my iPhone 7 (4 year old, mobile hardware). I wonder if maybe it’s using some webgl feature that your machine doesn’t accelerate natively?

For me, resolution is the problem. If I reduce window size from ~4K to a fraction of that, the animation changes from being painfully choppy to smooth. I'm running a fairly powerful desktop machine with a gaming GPU.

Anecdotally it uses about 1.5% CPU on my laptop with the current Firefox stable on Windows 10 20H2. Admittedly this is a machine with an 8 Core / 16 Thread CPU, but that still feels reasonable. Firefox overall is reporting around 3.5% usage with a YouTube video playing in 1080p fullscreen, Discord and three other open (and loaded) tabs.

Pretty similar setup and results. Was using 0.5%-1.5% before opening Zoomquilt 2, and using 1.6-2.7% after.

(Ryzen 7 4800H, Windows 10 20H2, Firefox 84.0.1, 1080p screen)

Exactly the same setup even. I was struggling to find the "About Firefox" option earlier, but I checked again (why is it in the help sub-menu?) and I also have 84.0.1.

Original author here! The original implementations of Zoomquilt 1+2 were done in flash. I created the HTML5 port in 2013. Zoomquilt 2 consists of 88 single images, each 1024x768px. Basically each image takes place at 50% the size in the center of the previous. For each frame, there are at most 4 images rendered at once on the canvas. The first Zoomquilt has smaller images of 800x600, hence the better performance. Arkadia.xyz has source images of 1200x900px.

The performance in Chrome is noticeably better than Firefox. The smaller the window size, the smoother the playback. Since it is only four images at once, whenever one image leaves the scene and a new one appears, there might be a small lag when the image is loaded into memory. I don't have a deeper understanding on how this could be optimized further for the browser.

For the Android OpenGL implementation I was able to take care of loading the images asynchronously before they enter the scene and freeing up the memory again after they leave the scene.

Happy to take suggestions on how this might be optimized further, as it would be interesting to work with even higher resolutions for future projects, but this quickly leads to much higher performance load and choppy playback on weaker machines.

Hi! I was just looking into it, see my other comment below. FF is terrible at resizing on `drawImage`, you can render at half resolution [1] to improve performance, and the smoothness makes up for the lost definition. Other tricks like rendering offscreen don't really do much, I guess using CSS transforms or WebGL would be the only other options but a ton more effort.

Thanks for these, they are incredible!

[1] when devicePixelRatio > 1, in FF only. Gets me from 24ms to 7ms/frame here

Thanks for pointing this out! Great suggestion, I will try it out.

That should be about 360MB of uncompressed data (1024x768x88x4 bytes) which should fit into the memory of most IGPs, which generally reserve 1 or 2 GB. Compositing 4 images at once should be something that even a very old GPU should have no problems with, even at 4K resolution. Windows Desktop Composition probably does a lot more work.

Still this indeed gets my laptop's fans spinning in both Chrome and Firefox. I wonder why that is... I don't think you can do a lot wrong code wise here. Maybe the composition takes a software path, but why?

Thanks for making this and for porting it to android! I changed phones about a month back and stumbled upon your wallpaper app by chance. It has made my homescreen such a delight these days as I never know what I'll see. Thanks again!

Great to hear! Glad you enjoy.

Upon a few moments of reflection, it's obvious to me I should just buy the 3rd wall paper both to see what I'm missing and to support this fine work. Thanks again!

Thanks mate! You can see the full thing for free here http://arkadia.xyz, It's just the Live Wallpaper version to purchase and support the artists;)

Any resources you can provide, so I can make my own site and all the art?

The power of confirmation bias. A factually incorrect comment on a tangential topic is still the number 1 comment after 3 hours just because it appeals to those who bemoan modern web development.

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