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Bullet Time

logicmag.io

1–10 of 26 posts

Re: Bullet Time

#2
I built an app exactly like this a long, long time ago, when JS server push became available and websockets didn’t exist yet, in PHP. 2010 maybe?

It made for incredibly entertaining chatter, but relied on pirated streams of live TV, and never went past an experiment :(

Re: Bullet Time

#4
Youtube used to have something similar with annotations.

You'd get videos spammed with them covering the screen.

But some uploaders used them to make something akin to DVD menus. Being able to skip to other videos or timestamps in a longer video.

Looks like Youtube removed it this year. Pity since it also served as a way to 'edit' or correct videos. Instead of putting it in the Description/Comments hoping to be read.

Re: Bullet Time

#5
this feels so dystopian to me. not only can the media be engineered to push whatever agenda but so can the perceived social reaction to it - like the mind control machine choking up its grip. of course it happens in China first

Re: Bullet Time

#6
post #3

Sounds like a live tv version of Twitch.

Yep, and Twitch has something similar when replacing Past Broadcasts, a viewer can layer their comments into the sidebar chat in real-time.

Re: Bullet Time

#7
post #5

this feels so dystopian to me. not only can the media be engineered to push whatever agenda but so can the perceived social reaction to it - like the mind control machine choking up its grip. of course it happens in China first

This comes from Nico Nico (some Japanese video site) and is basically like a live stream chat but overlaid on the video.

There’s definitely some argument about groupthink but you don’t need coordinated state propoganda for that, people end up doing that anyways

Re: Bullet Time

#8

Youtube used to have something similar with annotations. You'd get videos spammed with them covering the screen. But some uploaders used them to make something akin to DVD menus. Being able to skip to other videos or timestamps in a longer video. Looks like Youtube removed it this year. Pity since it also served as a way to 'edit' or correct videos. Instead of putting it in the Description/Comments hoping to be read.

Wasn't that open only to the video's uploader though?

Re: Bullet Time

#9
I had a Chinese roommate during university, I learned about this stuff from him. His desk was right by mine so I got to see a lot of this comment spam scrolling past the screen. It was a pretty interesting experience. I definitely thought it was pretty intrusive, I don't even like my cursor being on the screen when watching any video fullscreen. But I did think it was still really neat, you get a similar kind of social high from it as being in a crowd at a concert for example - you see everyone's reactions right when something climactic happens in the video.

This article did a much deeper and more detailed dive on the topic than what I heard via my roommate. I had no idea it had a proper name or the history around it, etc. Neither did I know the political/social implications.

He told me about the test to get on Bilibili, and he said he knew some people who spent a ton of time to study to get in, and even more who failed.

The experience of it can be somewhat closely resembled to watching the twitch chat of a very popular streamer who has subscriber-only mode enabled. In other words, 95% of the useless spam cut away from the free users, but still so much text flowing by that any real conversation is impossible. It's really just reactionary stuff. Someone else in this thread commented that the language density (less characters, more meaning in Chinese vs English) and the fact that scrolling text has a set duration not affected by other comments make it so it's a lot easier to keep up by just reading the periphery. E.g. on Twitch, the next comment pushes up the previous, so if it goes too fast you can't read anything at all, bullet comments take, say, 5 seconds to scroll from edge to edge (not sure on the specifics of the timing).

Re: Bullet Time

#10
post #3

Sounds like a live tv version of Twitch.

Trust me, the difference between the comments vertically scrolling in the sidebar and horizontally on top of the video is huge. In Twitch, when the comments become fast enough they literally give no time for the viewer to parse and understand most of them; With bullet comments plus Asian languages that have high letter-to-meaning ratio (or at least with my experience with Japanese on Niconico), each of the comments horizontally scrolling on top of the video leave just enough mental processing time to read through the majority of them and to grasp the atmosphere of the commenting hive-mind more clearly. This creates a sense of togetherness that is much more tight-knit than what you get from Twitch comments.
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