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Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner

philo.gay

21–30 of 81 posts

Re: Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner

#22
post #11

If you want to play around with slit scanning, I made this little toy a number of years ago and frequently find myself using it on trains: https://slitscan.space Press and hold your phone screen to switch between the front/back cameras, or hit "c" on a computer. Tapping the screen saves the image, as does "s".

This was fun to play around with

Re: Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner

#23
This project is more deeply technical but one thing I find fun is to take a video from a moving train and create a video stereogram by having one eye lagging in time/distance behind the other eye, letting you create very long baseline stereograms.

It's fun to be able to see the 3d effects on passing bridges, etc., and for large baselines on long straight stretches you can see the 3d structure of clouds in a fascinating way.

Re: Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner

#24
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think you'd be able to find this post (assuming it's still up)? Would love to see it.

https://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/scanner.html

Oh! I couldn't find it when I looked for it this morning. Thank you!

Re: Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner

#28
The wobbly pictures brings me back to my experience as a kid with hand-held photo scanners https://oldcomputer.info/pc/apscan/index.htm .

It was impossible (for me at least) to get a scan without shifting my hand position on the X-axis while also sliding the scanner down the picture.

Also, I seem to recall the scanner I used was only capable of outputting 1-bit dithered black and white pictures. This was late 80s/early 90s tech.

Re: Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner

#30
post #18

I've posted this here before but I have been creating animations using a similar process with a regular camera and manually splicing the frames together. [1,2,3] The effect is quite interesting in how it forces focus on the subject reducing the background into an abstract pattern. Each 'line' is around 15px wide. I think I went through exactly the same thought process as the author, funny how ideas can come up indepe…

Gorgeous!
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