Synthetic
4D.OS
0% received
Timeline Source ···
Every moment
at once
PlanRoom 4
Cat Camera
ClockSource
00:00:00
Frame 000 of ···
Camera 1What it saw
Label
Layers
Display
Gallery notice
Drag this notice across the wall. The trail it leaves is the flat version of what hangs in the case.
A black cat climbed a flight of stairs in fourteen seconds. All fourteen seconds hang here at once.
Film anything moving, rebuild every frame in three dimensions, and leave each one where and when it happened. What you get is not a model of the cat but a record of its passage: the rooms that follow show how.
Room 5
2D + time = 3D
A flat world that changes over time is already a solid. Stack its moments one above the other and time becomes a third dimension: the glider's walk across the grid turns into a staircase you could hold.
A 4D reconstruction does the same one dimension up. Each frame of a video becomes a small 3D scene, and the scenes are stacked along time. You cannot see four dimensions, so the case in Room 4 shows them the way this tower shows three: every moment at once.
Room 6
From video to space and time
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A 2D video
One camera films the subject. Every frame is a flat picture with a known position and direction.
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3D, frame by frame
Each frame is rebuilt as points in space: one small sculpture per moment.
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Left where and when it happened
Nothing is moved or merged. The moments stay where they were recorded, and together they draw the journey.
Synthetic The scene on display is not a reconstruction of real footage. A free 3D cat (CC-BY) was animated and sampled into points in the browser, frame by frame, and its "video" was rendered from a virtual camera. The format and the viewer are the ones a real pipeline would feed.
Room 7
Scroll is time
In this room you are the playhead. Scroll down to move forward, up to rewind.
Room 8
Measurements
Read from the pack now loaded in your browser, not typed by hand. Load another pack and these lines change.
- Frames
- ··· at ···
- Duration
- ···
- Moments of the cat
- ··· points, ··· per frame
- The alley
- ··· points, drawn once
- Points in the case
- ···
- Weight on disk
- ···
- Source frames
- ···
Room 9
Other subjects
Room 10
Questions
What am I looking at?
Every moment of a short clip, rebuilt in three dimensions and left in place. The trail is the cat's past; the highlighted cat is the present; the cone is the camera that filmed it, showing the frame it saw. The wall nearest to you is cut away so you can see into the alley.
Is it real?
No. This scene is synthetic, and it is labelled that way wherever it appears. It was made in the browser from a free 3D cat so the viewer could be built before real captures exist.
Why does it look like an old computer?
Because the old desktop already had this idea: drag a window and it leaves copies of itself behind. That trail is the flat version of the one in the case. The look is drawn live, not from recorded animations.
Why is it pixelated?
The case is rendered at a third of your screen's resolution and each pixel is enlarged without blurring. Colors are reduced to 16 (or 2) with ordered dithering. Switch the Display window to Millions to see it without the treatment.
Can I move through time myself?
Yes. Drag the timeline, press space to hold or resume, J and L to rewind or play faster, K to hold, and the arrow keys to step one frame. Drag inside the case to walk around it.