

Transsiberian Railway Trip as a Single Slitscan - onidaito
http://archive.section9.co.uk/transsiberian/

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nosuchthing
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/](http://seriss.com/people/erco/2001/)

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davnicwil
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?

~~~
coldtea
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.

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colanderman
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.

~~~
Tepix
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. :-)

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lnanek2
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.

~~~
colanderman
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.

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

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

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nether
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...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/16/google-tran-siberian-
express-tour)

~~~
MichaelGG
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](http://www.google.ru/intl/ru/landing/transsib/en.html)

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

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1504271](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1504271)

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zdean
This is a good collection of slitscan videos:

[https://vimeo.com/tag:slit-scan](https://vimeo.com/tag:slit-scan)

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jokoon
How safe is this train really ?

