Anyone who’s played video games has had plenty of experiences with graphical glitches. Sometimes things clip through walls, or flash back and forth between two different positions, or sometimes they just flat out freeze up. Luckily, those kind of things can’t happen in real life. Or can they? No, they can’t, but a cool camera trick involving a subwoofer, a camera, and some flowing water can make it look like real life just glitched up, and make you do a double take.
The way this works is that the subwoofer is vibrating at a regular frequency (24 hz in this case) making the water drip out and fall into the bucket in a very consistent pattern. When the camera is shooting at 24 frames per second, the pattern of the water and the pattern of the camera match up, creating the illusion that the water is frozen in mid-air. By slightly adjusting the frames-per-second of the camera, or the frequency of the sound, the effect can be slightly altered to make the water appear to flow upwards. This is the same phenomenon that sometimes makes hubcaps in car commercials seem as if they are spinning backwards.
So in the end, you have Science! to thank for what initially looks like magic, but the fact that it can be explained doesn’t make it any less awesome to look at.
(via reddit)
- The old “infinite energy” trick
- Placing a ping pong ball on a beer bottle with an excavator
- Ice cream trickery
Published: Apr 19, 2012 03:25 pm