2016 Bridges Conference Short Movie Festival
Henry Segerman
Filmmakers
Henry Segerman
Associate Professor of Mathematics
Oklahoma State University
Stillwater, Oklahoma, USA
Statement
Henry Segerman is an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at Oklahoma State University. His mathematical research is in 3-dimensional geometry and topology, and concepts from those areas often appear in his work. Other artistic interests involve procedural generation, self reference, ambigrams and puzzles.
Films
This is the equirectangular, "unwrapped" version of a spherical video. It can also be seen in the "in-sphere" view on YouTube.
Using Möbius transformations applied to the Riemann sphere, one can produce a zoom-like effect. Zooming is used in flat media to make "Droste effect" images: images that contain a smaller copy of themselves. In this spherical video we do the same, adding the extra feature that the zoomed copies of each frame are offset in time. We slowly zoom from one copy of the scene into the "smaller" copy. The duration of the time offset matches the flight time of the camera; thus the video loops.
For more details on the effect used in this video, see "Squares that Look Round: Transforming Spherical Images", by Saul Schleimer and Henry Segerman, http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.01396