This article was taken from the April 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
This is how a computer watches Inception. Usually, computer vision makes us think of traffic tracking, CCTV and airport security; with machines extending our view of the world.
But how would computers process what we watch for pleasure? That's the question posed by 43-year-old artist Ben Grosser from the University of Illinois, whose Computers Watching Movies project explores how machines respond to films. "We've grown up watching this medium," he says. "But what would a computer see?"
His algorithm focuses on prominent aspects of each frame, such as brightness, contrast and colour, then sketches the shifting focus over time as a graphic. Sometimes the computer emulates the way we watch -- tracing the floating plastic bag in American Beauty, say -- but its frenetic attempt to track the movement of every piece of debris during Inception's explosions highlights how, statically, humans absorb such busy scenes.
Human interaction with computers is a theme he's explored in projects such as Facebook Demetricator, which doctors your numbers of notifications and likes -- "It's been downloaded at Facebook," he laughs -- and ScareMail, a Gmail plug-in that appends emails with NSA watchwords.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
