Infinite Cat Zoom, 2004.

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 big chain. (It's still not infinite yet, but getting there.)

In each photo you can see a bit of the previous one, so a hall-of-mirrors effect results. This pretty much immediately suggests imaginging what it would be like to zoom through them all. So I put something together:


Tech Notes

I first collected the images, then wrote software to go through them and mark where the previous photo could be seen. This markup consisted of the 4 points in each image that corresponded to the corners of the prior image. One thing I did not anticipate is that, due to cropping and differences in aspect ratios of the images everyone had submitted, sometimes these corners would be invisible or off the side... but it worked out.

The animation process blends the 4 corner points out to the real corners. In each interpolated frame, a projective mapping is 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 is used to cross-blend the neighboring images.

Source images copyright Mike Stanfill, Infinite Cat Project. Used with permission.



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