The Infinite Cat Project is a collective art project by Mike Stanfill that collects photos of cats looking at photos of other cats. Lots of people have contributed, making a chain. In each photo you see a bit of the previous one. It makes you wonder what it’d be like to fly through them, so I put something together.
I collected the images, then wrote software (in Qt/C++) to go through them to mark where the previous photo could be seen in each one. The markup was the 4 points in each image that corresponded to the corners of the prior image. One tricky bit was that due to cropping and differences in aspect ratios of the images, sometimes these corners would be obscured or off the side.
With that done, the animation was generated by warping the 4 corner points out to the corresponding points in the next image. For each interpolated frame, a projective mapping was extracted from the 4 points. (See pg.18 of Paul Heckbert’s 1989 master’s thesis Fundamentals of Texture Mapping and Image Warping for details.) This mapping was used to cross-blend the neighboring images.
Source images copyright Mike Stanfill, Infinite Cat Project. Used with permission.