[HN Gopher] Pointer Pointer (2012)
___________________________________________________________________
Pointer Pointer (2012)
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 220 points
Date : 2025-10-09 12:42 UTC (11 days ago)
(HTM) web link (pointerpointer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (pointerpointer.com)
| pjerem wrote:
| This one is an old one. I still love it, now with nostalgia. I
| always wondered how they got all those pictures. It looks like
| there is a recurrent theme tho.
| dlenski wrote:
| It's fun indeed!
|
| The theme seems to be something like "college students at house
| parties"... reminds me very much of my friends and the photos
| we took at around this age.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I too felt a ton of nostalgia for this one. I recently featured
| it in my newsletter: https://randomdailyurls.com.
|
| If you're into this kind of stuff there's lot of new and old
| gems.
| ajoel24 wrote:
| Subscribed! Thanks for creating this newsletter.
| JRCharney wrote:
| Can you make a version with cats in it? Like cats jumping at the
| cursor or trying to catch the cursor with their paws.
| yapyap wrote:
| I don't see why not, go for it
| eknkc wrote:
| Since this is old, I assume someone found these photos and then
| manually selected the pointer location. Maybe used openCV or
| something like that.. But I'd most likely go with manual.
|
| There are 700+ images defined in https://pointerpointer.com/new-
| positions.json and the script finds the closest match to the
| current mouse pointer.
| sky2224 wrote:
| Yeah probably. It likely made it significantly easier given
| that the images are always super zoomed in, so a single finger
| pointing covers roughly 6-8 mouse pointer locations (I'm kind
| of eye-balling it here).
| GuB-42 wrote:
| The images are also shifted to match the mouse pointer
| exactly, easier to notice near the edges.
| 1-more wrote:
| 710. Did a binary search on the URLs. Didn't look at the JS,
| whoops.
| atoav wrote:
| I _think_ this was created by the people at the art collective of
| monochrom.at,
|
| This is where I have seen this the first time ca. 2006.
|
| Edit: Now that I searched for it I only found their project
| ZeigerPointer, where they collect such images, maybe I mixed it
| up.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| This is apparently from 2012, but I could've sworn it was older
| than that.
| Sesse__ wrote:
| I thought so, too, but I checked my IRC logs and it was
| discussed in 2012-2015 but never before that.
| yapyap wrote:
| good old web2 fun
| JimDabell wrote:
| Along similar lines:
|
| > On May 4th, 2007, we asked internet users to help isolate
| Michael Jackson's white glove in all 10,060 frames of his
| nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean. 72 hours
| later 125,000 gloves had been located. wgt_data_v1.txt (listed
| below) is the culmination of data collected.
|
| -- https://www.whiteglovetracking.com
| agys wrote:
| This is an old project by Studio Moniker (Amsterdam)... I was
| once at a presentation of their work at Resonate in Belgrade
| (memories...) and they explained that the slight delay before the
| reveal of the underlying image is added artificially to add a bit
| of drama.
|
| Btw, the correct image is loaded through a Voronoi diagram.
| muzani wrote:
| I'm surprised how well this works on mobile. I thought the photos
| would be distorted at least.
| petercooper wrote:
| Paul Irish explained the basics of how it works here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2ZXW2HBLPM
|
| I wonder if you could create something similar nowadays using
| generative AI but with the finger in a very specific location
| without pregenerating thousands of images.
| syx wrote:
| Very interesting explanation, I've always wondered how it was
| built, I didn't know Paul Irish made a video about this. Thanks
| for sharing!
| slmjkdbtl wrote:
| How do they acquire these images?
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Probably harvested from MySpace and Facebook.
| keepamovin wrote:
| This is hilarious. I thought it was gonna be one of those pointer
| animation nightmares, and I was going to regret clicking on it,
| but I still kind of wanted to click on it anyway. But actually,
| it's really funny and amazing to think about how you created it.
| senfiaj wrote:
| How does it work? Does it contain all the possible images with al
| the possible pointer positions? Does it do some corrections, such
| as rotation or shift to the original image?
| TealMyEal wrote:
| It's funny, im sure to Millennials this is jsut some nostalga to
| a simpler internet but I find seeing old dorm rooms and random
| slices of life from more than a decade ago really intresting,
| from the fashion to the red eyes from the flash. half of these
| photos look like they could appear on a modern Lo-Fi album cover
| kevstev wrote:
| I thought the same. It made me wonder where they sourced the
| photos from, almost looks like they sourced it from webshots or
| a similar site in the mid 2000s. It was nice to see people just
| being caught in happy moments, and made me realize how much
| "content" on social these days is so highly curated and posed.
| dack wrote:
| I didn't like that there was a long delay after you move your
| mouse, and since all the calculation happens on the frontend, i
| figured you could easily make it ~instantly update and follow you
| around. So i (well, claude) made a version that does that and i
| think it's more fun. here's the code you can paste into the
| console at pointerpointer.com: https://pastebin.com/f7YqQNxg
| internetguy wrote:
| this is pretty cool, it seems they reuse every image by
| translating it a little when your cursor is within a range
| lacoolj wrote:
| Mildly too addicting for me
|
| Gotta get back to work
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-10-20 23:01 UTC)