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4-Mation: 3D Zoetropes

An evening pause: I honestly don’t understand how this works, and the video doesn’t really explain it. It is quite amazing nonetheless. More information here if you want to dig about to figure it out.

Hat tip Cotour.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

5 comments

  • The term tickled my memory, and I recalled that zoetropes were a pre-film animation method. Although not really visible (to me), I suspect he is using strobe-lights and a fast-rotating disc to create the illusion of stop-motion. A timing light does the same thing. Another example would be the strobe-light calibration on some stereo turntables. There are marks on the side of the turntable that will appear stationary when the platter is at the correct speed. You can sort of see how this is working in his application from the oscilloscope traces.

    Fun stuff, and amazing to watch.

  • An idea: Adjust the stobe light and have the illusion run backward!

  • Cotour

    “I honestly don’t understand how this works, and the video doesn’t really explain it.”

    https://youtu.be/WtqDHJDN79w

    The strobe light is concentrated and its timing is controlled over the revolving fish and your eye only registers what the timed strobe light transmits to your eye. The strobe light is timed precisely to give the fish the appearance that they are in fact moving forward. You could adjust the strobe to make the fish appear to go backwards if you so desired. If there were no strobe light concentrated and precisely controlled over the revolving fish all you would see would be a blur of revolving fish and color.

    You can see the valve operating in an engine that you know is turning at 8500 RPM, but all the concentrated strobe directed at the valve allows your eye to see is it working in slow motion.

    https://youtu.be/jWIcVP6GRfw

    You know the helicopter’s blades are turning and lifting it into the air, so why do the blades appear not to be turning at all? This is similar to the strobe lights effect, but this effect is due to the frame rate of the digital camera recording it. The frame rate of the camera is precisely timed with the rotating blades and records them in essentially the same place in their rotation. Same thing but from a different technical perspective.

  • Cotour

    PS: “Real time” consists of our human perception without a cycle. Your eye sees the light from the sun reflected off of matter and there is no cycle to the light from the sun, its just ON. Light in the universe / from the sun travels at 186,000 miles per second, and there is no cycle to it, it is ON. That is reality.

    Humanity produces electricity which we transform into light at 60 cycles per second by revolving a shaft wound with copper wire past a magnet. And the electricity from that cyclical production of electricity which is transformed into light appears to be “Real time” and without interruption, but that is just an expression of the limitation of our brains and it is not “Reality”.

    The human brain has its limitations and sometimes what it interprets as real time reality in fact is something else. And there are aspects of existence that may be beyond human ability to detect and even understand.

  • Jerry Greenwood

    Simple. Persistence of vision.

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