Dream Deeply brings disturbing trippy results
If you haven’t heard about Google Dream Deep technology, it’s a project that Google open-sourced for neural network visualization which Dream Deeply, a project on Indigogo, has codified and handed out to the world as a website/service.
The end result of Dream Deeply is turning normal images into something out of a Salvador Dali acid trip and it’s a fascinating look into how Google recognizes objects in images.
Users of Google Photos or Google Image Search who have wondered how it knows which photos are cats and which photos are zombies may see a bit of how things are perceived. Or you may just look at the results and think it’s horrible.
Dream Deeply takes what Google sort of recognizes and inserts it back into your photo. The results are nightmarish and fascinating to peruse. It’s absurdly processor intensive, so your results may take a while … you may find you’ve been dreaming before you get your Dream Deeply results.
The Indigogo campaign was to get enough money to make the Dream Deeply website respond to requests instantly, and it was funded at the basic level with 24 more days to go. Users wishing to contribute something other than cash can run a virtualbox and contribute CPU cycles to making the world a trippier place.
There aren’t any configuration items at the moment (you have some you can use on Dreemdeeply.com, none on the project page). You just get back an image at some indeterminate time from submission and it may be amazing, or it may be you find out your eyes are now teeth, or like me discover your hair is now some sort of fish and you appear to have a peacock in your neck.
Uploaded images appear in a running submission gallery here, and on dreemdeeply.com, and there aren’t any privacy options at the moment, so there are trippy not safe for work images that pop up every now and then. Clicking on them will give you a before and after, which is what I had to do figure out what was stalking a woman in one photo
Above: Woman is stalked by a Koala/Platypus beast
Not so much here.
This man’s dream pants are amazing
Dream Deeply isn’t going to change the world, but it’s something fun to play with. The dreamdeeply.com website will let you push your picture and be notified via email when it’s ready, what I assume is the original site, not many options.
Edvard Munch: The Bark
If you want to download a nearly four gigabytes of virtual machine and software to run it, you can get to the front of the line when it comes to processing. The drawback is your computer will be using cpu cycles while you’re running the thing, and you’ll be contributing a small amount of electricity to the greater good.
You can play with it for free at Dream Deeply, help them fund a better server farm on Indigogo.
