explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

Talk:941: Depth Perception

2019-11-27T00:00:44Z

162.158.107.61:

Somebody needs to try this. Couldn't be that hard.
[[Special:Contributions/71.178.11.180|71.178.11.180]] 21:27, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Those must have been some tall goalposts if his point of view is above the clouds! -- mwburden [[Special:Contributions/70.91.188.49|70.91.188.49]] 13:16, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Also, the cameras should be mounted on servos so that when the phone is moved or tilted the cameras can follow, so your viewpoint isn't fixed in one direction. -- mwburden [[Special:Contributions/70.91.188.49|70.91.188.49]] 13:18, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

:That wouldn't work. The entire football field would have to swivel, or else he'd get some wicked image shearing... [[Special:Contributions/108.28.72.186|108.28.72.186]] 01:42, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

::actually, it might be possible to correct for that, using bipolar geometry. Essentially, you can derive a 3d model from 2 images from different view points. [http://danielwedge.com/fmatrix/ Here] is a (very geeky) demontration of what can be done. Watch the end, where they construct a fly-around video from two images of the opera house in sidney. -- [[Special:Contributions/141.101.104.22|141.101.104.22]] 21:10, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

::: Interesting link, thanks, but I don't think the video was generated from only 2 images, there isn't enough information. If you select "Download the Opera House sequence" you can download the original 43 photographs used. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.9|141.101.99.9]] 14:05, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

:::: You're right. But of course you wouldn't need a 90-degree flyby for this. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.104.43|141.101.104.43]] 16:56, 8 July 2015 (UTC)

An updated solution would be to put the two stabilised cameras on quadracopters which are coded to remain a set distance apart. When you want to look left/right it would take a while for the pair of drones to rotate around their centre point but not too long..... Then you could also get a perspective from the height of a giant (up to 400ft https://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=22615) and with their degree of parallax (from whatever value of height and eye spacing you choose). {{unsigned ip|108.162.250.225}}
:This is a very cool project indeed! Some hardcore image stabilizing software would be required too, since you would get nauseous if the two images weren't perfectly aligned at all times. But this setup is the only one I could think of that would enable you to perceive the view from the last frame. [[User:Mumiemonstret|Mumiemonstret]] ([[User talk:Mumiemonstret|talk]]) 08:44, 17 December 2014 (UTC)
::That idea would probably work but at one point, the quadcoptors would have issues flying any higher which would limit the view.
Look at this in stereo mode: http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Solar and cross your eyes so you see three images, then hold your hands up so you only see the one, then...
I forget...

[[User:Weatherlawyer| I used Google News BEFORE it was clickbait]] ([[User talk:Weatherlawyer|talk]]) 12:44, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

I used to do that all the time at one time ... until I got a l...ot of things different to do..

[[User:Weatherlawyer| I used Google News BEFORE it was clickbait]] ([[User talk:Weatherlawyer|talk]]) 12:44, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

Stereo aerial pairs of clouds do exist see the Google search: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=stereoscopic+aerial+photos+clouds [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.206|141.101.98.206]] 07:33, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

Or you could ride in an airplane. Or stand on a mountain. [[Special:Contributions/173.245.50.174|173.245.50.174]] 19:58, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

:That would defeat the point entirely. The distance between the two viewpoints is what provides the increased perspective, not the height of the observer. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.80.84|141.101.80.84]] 21:55, 16 November 2015 (UTC)
: using a plane isn't a substitute for this, but there's no reason adding the element of flight has to defeat it ''entirely'': you could put one cam on each wing tip & get maybe the coolest effect of all..

Likely the reason the right image is shown on the left and vise versa is that there are two ways to fuse stereo images. Either Walleyed, right-to-rght, or Crosseyed, right-to-left. Doing it the wrong way may result in concave faces and other aberrations. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.255.125|162.158.255.125]] 15:20, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Clouds are fractal, small ones up close look the same as big ones far away. So I don't think this would look as spectacular as imagined. {{unsigned ip|162.158.39.209}}

The thing is that our brains only associate the binocular/3D effect with items that are relatively close, and tend to judge sizes accordingly. If something appears 3D to us, we judge it to be a certain distance away (a key function of binocular vision) and from that we also get a rough estimate of its size. That's why if you see something like a star destroyer in 3D in the movie theater, it looks like something the size of a bus hanging up in the general vicinity of the screen. It doesn't look like something miles long, because big things look flat when they look that size. I believe this way of looking at clouds would give a similar effect. The clouds might look 3D, but they'd also just seem closer and smaller, rather than giving you a real sense of their size. {{unsigned ip|162.158.78.10}}

:One way to impress with size is to make sure there's something on the "back wall" to contrast with the foreground. [https://i.redd.it/3watd55xafq31.jpg Here's a crosseye cloud picture] I made from several pictures out an airplane window. The distance in time between these was one second, according to the EXIF data. Because the foreground cloud is so large, the faraway cloud at the center looks like Randall's "mountains" should. I should note this is a zoom/crop of a much larger pair of pictures. [[User:DuplexFields|DuplexFields]] ([[User talk:DuplexFields|talk]]) 01:26, 4 October 2019 (UTC)

Talk:2200: Unreachable State

2019-09-11T03:54:31Z

162.158.107.61: Added comment

When I tried to go here originally, it was unreachable. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.107.61|162.158.107.61]] 03:54, 11 September 2019 (UTC)

927: Standards

2019-08-29T00:24:21Z

162.158.107.61: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 927
| date = July 20, 2011
| title = Standards
| image = standards.png
| titletext = Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.
}}

==Explanation==
For any engineering task, there are numerous ways a given problem can be solved. The more complex the task, the more room for diversity. That's all well and good for a one-off problem, but if a design is meant to be iterated over time, or if an entire industry is solving that same problem, part reuse and {{w|interoperability}} become issues to deal with. {{w|Technical standards}} thus came to exist so that industries could avoid wasting resources {{w|reinventing the wheel}}, whilst offering their clients a certain amount of simplicity and compatibility between vendors.

But, standards have issues of their own. They don't accommodate every {{w|Use Case|use case}}, they might have restrictions or royalties attached, and people tend to be plagued by ''{{w|Not invented here|Not Invented Here syndrome}}''. So, competing standards have a tendency to arise to address different perceived needs. After a while, the market for competing standards gets messy and hard to follow, and {{w|system integration|integrating systems}} built around competing standards gets burdensome. As a result, someone eventually takes on the challenge of creating a universal standard that everyone can rally around.

This almost never works. In many cases, a new standard fails to displace the incumbent standards, eventually loses funding and support, and thus becomes a relic of history. In many other cases, it only penetrates far enough to survive, ironically making the situation messier. The latter situation often ends up becoming cyclical, with new standards periodically rising and failing to gain traction.

Three examples are given at the top of the comic: {{w|AC adapter|AC chargers}}, {{w|character encoding}} and {{w|instant messaging}}.
* Power adapters are notorious for varying from device to device - partly to try to prevent dangerous voltage/current mismatches, but partly just because manufacturers all chose different adapter designs. Mobile phone chargers have mostly converged on a common USB-based solution, but laptop charging is still a long way out, despite the adoption of yet another standard, {{w|IEC 62700}}. Randall notes that there was initially additional complexity due to the fact that there were also ''competing USB types'', but thanks to the European Union's {{w|common external power supply}} specification, micro-USB comprehensively won the day. Three years after the release of this comic, in August 2014 the {{w|USB Type-C}} specification was published and may displace micro-USB, it's gaining ground among laptop manufacturers as well.
* Character encoding is, in theory, a solved problem - {{w|Unicode}} is a standard for character sets which currently includes over 135,000 characters. However, Unicode is not an encoding, just an abstract representation of the characters, and there are several implementations which encode Unicode "code points" into usable characters (including the two most common, {{w|UTF-8}} and {{w|UTF-16}}). Despite the success of UTF-8 Unicode, older encodings like {{w|Windows-1252}} have stuck around, continuing to cause weird bugs in old software and websites to this day.
* Unlike the other examples, there has been little or no effort by instant messaging companies to make their services interoperable. There's more value to keeping IM as a {{w|closed platform}} so users are forced to use the company's software to access it. Some software, like the {{w|Trillian (software)|Trillian}} chat client, can connect to multiple different services, but there is essentially no way to, for example, send a Twitter message directly to a Skype user.

==Transcript==
:How Standards Proliferate
:(See: A/C chargers, character encodings, instant messaging, etc.)

:Situation:
:There are 14 competing standards.

:Cueball: 14?! Ridiculous! We need to develop one universal standard that covers everyone's use cases.
:Ponytail: Yeah!

:Soon:
:Situation: There are 15 competing standards.
{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]