Time Warp Art

(Via Matt McIrvin)

Here's some weirdness for you. A University of Tokyo project uses high powered computing to generate time warping art. The concept is this: Imagine a thick stack of photos, each taken at a slightly later time. So we have basically a 3D brick of images, in which two of the dimensions represent space, and the third dimension represents time. We take a 2D "slice" through this brick, and display it. As we move the slice back and forth, we see earlier and later images. Now, here's where the "warping" comes in: each little piece of the viewing slice can be showing different points of time.

The researches have a developed a flexible display screen that allows you to literally push a single point on the screen to a later time. It's hard to explain, but take a look at this demo: (if you can play wmv files).