Photos Always Pointing at the Pointer (2012)

This could be a serious time sink for someone. After just a few moments I was like "wait, I am going to sit here and keep moving this mouse... must leave".

Seriously though, I wonder where it pulls the images from... seems like a lot of parties and drinking.

quenix• 4 years ago

It looks like it "cheats" sometimes.

It reuses pictures by zooming and moving the entire picture around until the point position and cursor position match.

epalm• 4 years ago

Sounds like a feature, not a bug.

nsxwolf• 4 years ago

This is the greatest use of machine learning I've ever seen.

woudsma• 4 years ago

No ML, just JS and voronoi!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Z2ZXW2HBLPM

apetresc• 4 years ago

How do Voronoi diagrams help you figure out the trajectory of a finger in a photo?

ta988• 4 years ago

The voronoi is just used to map the x,y coordinates to tiles that then map to images. Doesn't say how the images were selected and the finger coordinates mapped in the first place to generate that map.

positus• 4 years ago

Delightful!

speps• 4 years ago

HN thread from 2012 (67 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4095237

HN thread from 2020 (68 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25372356

jwilk• 4 years ago

2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8583179 (31 comments)

flerchin• 4 years ago

Wonderful! Good work.

SilasX7• 4 years ago

There were too many NSFW/L photos with no warning. For me, 2/3 before I gave up.

neogodless• 4 years ago

Are you talking about people who appear inebriated? Because that's all I saw. Nothing truly NSFW. Just went back for another dozen. No inappropriate skin showing, no illegal activities (unless, of course, there are underage people drinking, but it's hard to tell that for sure.)

SilasX7• 4 years ago

Male lifting up his shirt, which, while not obscene, is also not SFW. Another picture had a bloody finger.

I don't know why people seem to be so incredulous/outraged at my observation. Is it that hard to believe such pictures made it into the set? Am I supposed to be supporting the team here?

Akronymus2• 4 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32070771 Maybe check out the image I got?

bbbbbenji• 4 years ago

Well, it's not wrong: https://i.ibb.co/8sydp6V/Screenshot-from-2022-07-12-16-23-59...

ImJasonH• 4 years ago

Some people would call this pointless, but I obviously disagree.

pkdpic2• 4 years ago

Yeah those people are the worst. This project rules.

bestouff• 4 years ago

I see your point.

toyg3• 4 years ago

It's very clear what direction this conversation has taken.

ChrisMarshallNY3• 4 years ago

I noticed they are all white people. Does the algorithm have trouble with other skin tones?

That is actually a serious question, and it has nothing to do with the personal bias or motivations of the author.

I was once shown an algorithm for removing red-eye from photos, and noticed that every example they showed, was of drunk white Irish people (usually with light eyes). Turned, out, the library didn't do so well, for other skin tones.

[EDITED TO ADD] I actually enjoyed the heck out of it. Many of the comments, below, explain why it seems that way. Also, it may just be "the luck of the draw." I suspect that most images are from a common demographic, because that was who the photographers that supplied the images, came from. The tech, itself, seems to be quite basic, and is a fun idea.

ravedave5• 4 years ago

I had several people with darker skin tones.

zweifuss• 4 years ago

Me too.

mellosouls2• 4 years ago

Me too.

jer0me• 4 years ago

My guess is that the location of fingers were manually identified so it’s more an issue of where the photos are sourced from.

Klathmon• 4 years ago

IIRC this wasn't made by an algorithm, the pointing locations were mapped by hand and the list of images is fixed.

So I think in this case it is because of personal bias of the author (regardless of how unintended it might be)

fullmoon• 4 years ago

Since “Implicit bias” could not have been proven to actually exist your charge is a direct personal one based on nothing concrete at all.

pkdpic2• 4 years ago

I really love this project but that is a super on point observation. I should have noticed that. And I think the answer to your question is probably obviously yes. Like I know what I'm talking about...

Also very curious on the source for these images. They seem like scraped Facebook photos from a very specific time range. Maybe early 2000s?

Anyway whatever this is its art and I love it and it should be at the MoMA.

ChrisMarshallNY3• 4 years ago

I agree. It is super fun. Kudos!

mynegation2• 4 years ago

I watched the video mentioned in another comment just to figure out exactly that question. From my understanding Voronoi diagrams are not used to find finger position, it is most likely preset, probably by human.

laumars• 4 years ago

There are other skin tones but you're right it's mostly white people. However it's worth baring in mind that this is an old site. Wayback machine has it at 2012. I'm sure I've read an explanation that said each image was manually curated and then the angle of the pointing manually plotted. So I wouldn't say there's any algorithm bias beyond whatever images the author had access to at that point (no pun intended) in time.

onionisafruit2• 4 years ago

You're observation is generally correct. Here's an exception that proves the rule: https://pointerpointer.com/images/678.jpg

yakubin• 4 years ago

FWIW I got 30%+ Asians. The rest was White.

latchkey• 4 years ago

Shrug, the first image that came up for me was people with dark skin.

xtracto• 4 years ago

Strange, I did get photos with black people in the first tries.

bayindirh• 4 years ago

I got asian and black people too. Not all of them white.

JetAlone• 4 years ago

I noticed in the photos I got, the person pointing was usually white, sometimes asian, and then plenty of black people were standing in some of those photos.

account422• 4 years ago

So? Ask yourself, would you have made the same comment if it was predominantly people of any other skin color?

What do we gain by forcing token inclusiveness into everything except making it feel artificial. What's wrong with the author just having mostly white friends to source pictures from?

This whole idea that you need people of your own skin color or gender or whatever because you can't identify with others is absurd.

ChrisMarshallNY3• 4 years ago

Sigh …

Listen, sorry I asked. I originally asked, because I was under the impression that the photo selection was the result of an algorithm, and I actually shared an example, from my own life, that established a context for the question.

In my testing, I went through dozens of photos, and, in my testing, they all came up white, so it’s not surprising that I would have the idea that there was some … homogeneity … to the dataset.

I quickly found out, due to comments, that the selection was done manually, and that the dataset was not completely homogenous, rendering my question moot. In fact, I even added a comment, to that effect.

But by that time, it was too late. The torches and pitchforks were out. As it is standard practice, on the Internet, to jump to wild, cartoonish, hilariously wrong, conclusions about people, I set myself up for that.

Basically, I made the same mistake as you: an inaccurate assumption, based on insufficient data.

I won’t make this mistake again.

Have a great day.

toyg3• 4 years ago

This would be useful if only I could save the resulting image somehow, and reuse it in my presentations / memes.

onionisafruit2• 4 years ago

This is where the magic happens: https://pointerpointer.com/new-positions.json

melony• 4 years ago

Train neural net and generate it dynamically!

archibaldJ• 4 years ago

oh wow this cracks me up in ways unbeknownst to me, almost in the same fashion as the first time I experienced the surreality of VR ping pong. There is something strange about human reactivity (and interactive humourous side-effects) that we need to research more on.

Akronymus2• 4 years ago

That was fun.

Until there randomly was a finger seemingly with a crush injury along with a large pin shoved into it lengthwise.

WHY wasn't that vetted out?

This one, specifically https://i.imgur.com/JimNuUL.png (Showing the injury/pin, so dont click if you dont wanna see it)

andrew_• 4 years ago

These are all photos that look like they were taken with disposable cameras in the early 2000s. First thought was "why do all of these look like they were taken at my college parties?"

AustinDev• 4 years ago

Seriously I think I saw someone I hung out with in RVA in the late 2000's

sbarre2• 4 years ago

Yeah someone got their hands on a Myspace image crawl..

pchristensen• 4 years ago

Apparently this site goes back to at least 2012, so the pics would have to be older than that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4095237

toyg3• 4 years ago

Probably fishing from the golden age of Facebook sharing.

quickthrower2• 4 years ago

Half of the people look drunk. Which makes sense. Being this is selected for photos of people pointing at random places!

tablespoon• 4 years ago

These are all photos that look like they were taken with disposable cameras in the early 2000s. First thought was "why do all of these look like they were taken at my college parties?"

You're probably not too far off.

This is apparently all the photos it uses: https://gist.github.com/Q726kbXuN/6937cf84ac6debcb2027cdba13.... I eyeballed it for a bit and all those that had timestamps were from 2004-2006. I also saw a Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign sign in the background of one.

kebman• 4 years ago

Ok I get the point!1

dzonga• 4 years ago

wow!!

p5v• 4 years ago

Ehh, the good old college party years :)

EForEndeavour• 4 years ago

I'd never seen this. So cool!

After an image loads, you can resize your browser text (Ctrl + / Ctrl -) to instantly reveal a different image with each resize event. By sweeping through very small and very large zoom levels, you can make peoples' fingers trace out a diagonal line from top-left to bottom-right as the registered point moves with the underlying voronoi canvas as it scales up and down.

Side note: how hard would it be to reduce the time delay between identifying a point and displaying an image? Could this be made realtime by preloading all images? The flicker would be terrible but I'd want to try it at least briefly.

dspillett4• 4 years ago

how hard would it be to reduce the time delay between identifying a point and displaying an image

Easy, I expect. I assumed there were two reasons for the delay:

* Simply a transfer delay, though even for images not seen before I'm only seeing between 20ms and 80ms in total for that each time (though it does seem to request each twice).

* Debouncing, to avoid requesting many images needlessly while a user moves the mouse around the page.

* For show, to make it look like it is doing something more clever that requires noticeable processing time!

All but the transfer delay can be removed easily as I think they are put in deliberately, and the transfer+render delay is short enough not matter for what you describe wanting to try.

ksala_• 4 years ago

As for the other comment, there is an artificial 2s delay between image loads. It might be to reduce the load on the server, or just to make it seems like it's doing more work than it is.

A very hacky way to remove it (I'm sure there are better ways!) is to redefine the setTimeout function to just ignore the delay and call the function directly. Open the console and type

    setTimeout = (x => x())

On a fast connection with this loading it's almost immediate - it's pretty cool to just drag your cursor across the screen.

But yes, the flicker is pretty bad. This is not handled very well (as expected), it would be nice if it tried to "stick" to one image for a few ms instead of flickering between the same two while moving.

nalinidash• 4 years ago

Oh...here is an exception https://imgur.com/a/In4MtJY

sbarre2• 4 years ago

I got that image earlier. You're getting a crop on mobile but there's a guy out of frame on the left who is pointing across the image.

ASalazarMX• 4 years ago

Yup. Some apparent misses are because the images are zoomed, so they can be shifted and reused with different coordinates. Unfortunately some images end up with the pointing finger out of frame.

jonnypotty• 4 years ago

Why do I find this so funny? Good work. Thanks.

goatcode• 4 years ago

I wonder what is the worst picture in its source. I managed to find a bird being flipped in one (as the pointing finger). How deep does this rabbit hole go?

john-doe• 4 years ago

Made by Studio Puckey: https://puckey.studio/projects/pointer-pointer

banana_giraffe• 4 years ago

If you're like me and just want to see all of the images:

https://gist.github.com/Q726kbXuN/6937cf84ac6debcb2027cdba13...

deepspace2• 4 years ago

The guy in the 13th photo just looks wrong somehow, like a CGI person down in the uncanny valley.

shrimpx• 4 years ago

I’m pretty sure that’s a wax figure or a painted wood sculpture.

shreyshnaccount• 4 years ago

I saw this site YEARSSS ago, brings back memories of bunking class to play games xD

really cool!

adamredwoods• 4 years ago

Why Voronoi? Why not circle-line collision, the line being from the start of the finger to approximate end space. The lines can be done manually, maybe drawn in with an app.

dannyphantom• 4 years ago

I remember this from StumbleUpon :)

Something that I did as a teenager and just tried again is take a sticky note, cut a small square in it and place it on your screen, you can "refind" pictures so it's not all random. Probably obvious to those more knowledgeable than I but nonetheless amusing.

vladf• 4 years ago

Didn’t work for me: https://ibb.co/56rr18X

felipelalli• 4 years ago

What is the point?

atum47• 4 years ago

This is hilarious

_narendra_• 4 years ago

Just curious, how can you get images like this?

Photos Always Pointing at the Pointer (2012)

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