hacking visualization

The American Museum of Natural History's film flies from the Himalayas out through the atmosphere and solar system to the afterglow of the Big Bang, using its Digital Universe Atlas four-dimensional map.

A short demo of the Deep Visualization Toolbox, which shows the activations inside a convolutional neural network as it processes live camera input. Viewers see individual units responding to edges, faces and text.

A short NASA Goddard visualization from the GEOS-5 model showing a year of atmospheric carbon dioxide moving around the globe. It shows plumes from sources, hemispheric differences and seasonal swings as plants grow and die back.

A six-minute journey through the layers of a neural network using Deep Dream, with each frame fed back into the network starting from random noise and the targeted layer changing every four seconds. It is set to downtempo music.

Samy Kamkar demonstrates OpenSesame, a device that opens many fixed-code garage doors in seconds by exploiting a newly found attack, built around a Mattel toy. The video explains the attack and which brands are affected.

A three-minute capture of SORTDEMO.BAS, the sorting visualization that shipped with QBasic. It animates insertion, bubble, heap, exchange, shell and quick sort with chiptune-like sound.

A Gource visualization of 826 days of Minecraft development, from alpha 1.2 to release 1.5, condensed into eight minutes. Each dot is a file, folders are links, and developers fly around zapping files as they work on them.

A short explainer showing what walking through walls would look like with movement in a fourth spatial dimension, using the 4D puzzle game Miegakure.

A roughly hour-long live hacking session in which Go team members Andrew Gerrand and Brad Fitzpatrick write the new version of tip.golang.org, the site serving leading-edge Go documentation. It is unedited pair programming on a real Go project.

A long George Hotz livestream in which he explores the coronavirus genome and molecular biology from scratch using a browser and Python, hacking on the science in real time.

The Thought Emporium's host describes making and taking a DIY gene therapy to treat his own lactose intolerance. It uses an AAV virus to deliver DNA coding for the lactose-digesting enzyme, made with biohacker Gabriel Licina's help.

A visualization and sonification of 15 sorting algorithms, from selection sort to bogo sort, run on shuffled integers in six minutes. Each algorithm gets a size and speed scaled to its complexity.

A recording of the TASBot block at Awesome Games Done Quick 2017, where a robot plays games via tool-assisted speedruns, including Super Mario 64 and Portal on an SNES via arbitrary code execution, and ending with a Twitch Plays segment. It showcases console exploits and creative hardware hacking.

CNLohr explains how he made an ESP32 produce valid LoRa packets without a LoRa radio, using aliasing and clever signal tricks. It walks through the RF math and shows how far the signals reach.

A spectrogram visualization of the sounds in a dial-up modem handshake, with an annotated image explaining each noise. It shows how the handshake's tones map to the negotiation steps.

An animation presenting a non-standard helical or vortex model of the solar system, in which the planets trail the Sun through space instead of orbiting in flat circles. The model is a non-conventional view that the author says differs from standard diagrams.

Mike of mikeselectricstuff shows his heavily modified old BBC Micro system in a 28-minute tour of 8-bit hardware archaeology.

Linus Akesson demonstrates the Commodordion, a fully functional 8-bit accordion built around Commodore 64 hardware with bellows made of floppy disks. He performs Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag and tells the story of the build.

A short film made with cold neutron imaging at the Paul Scherrer Institut showing a moka pot brewing coffee, sped up four times. The neutron beam makes the water and steam inside the pot visible.

A short animation reconstructing a planet's looping orbit using Ptolemy's epicycles and deferents, with the epicycles tracing out the face of Homer Simpson. It shows how enough circles can reproduce nearly any shape.

Andreas Kling ports the game Diablo to SerenityOS, his from-scratch Unix-like operating system, using the devilutionX project. The roughly 80-minute session shows what porting third-party software to the OS involves.

A short demo of Code Bubbles, an IDE interface built around editable code fragments in bubbles instead of files. It was a research prototype for Java development.

Hungarian folk dancers from Sapientia University act out the quicksort algorithm step by step, with music. It is part of the AlgoRythmics series of sorting algorithms performed as dance.

A short demo of a playable Space Invaders game built inside Dwarf Fortress, with a downloadable map. It shows the game's mechanics used as a computing substrate.

A brief clip of a Nook Simple Touch e-ink reader running PlayStation 1 games through an emulator with a hacked fast refresh rate.

Scott Manley's short animation shows every asteroid discovery from 1970 to 2015 plotted over time in 8K. It makes visible how survey technology made discoveries accelerate and where telescopes looked.

A one-minute clip from Cambridge's Prof. Holger Babinsky that debunks the equal transit time explanation of lift. It shows how air actually flows over a wing.

Ben Heck modifies a keyboard with magnets, Hall effect sensors and an Xbox controller so the WASD keys give analog control. He walks through the hardware build.

A short clip demonstrating a phone-based social engineering trick in which a crying baby in the background is used to pressure a customer service rep. It shows how attackers exploit human sympathy rather than technical flaws.

Strange Parts spends four months, seven custom circuit boards and several disassembled iPhones adding a working headphone jack to an iPhone 7 in China. The build is documented in detail.

Henry Segerman and collaborators demonstrate virtual reality experiences in non-Euclidean spaces, including hyperbolic and mixed hyperbolic-Euclidean geometry. The browser-based demos let viewers move through these spaces and show how strange the geometry feels from inside.

Tom7 (suckerpinch) builds and evaluates a series of absurd hard drives, including storage made from ping packets across the internet. The video accompanies his paper and mixes deep technical hacking with comedic storytelling.

A short visualization from HotNets researchers of routing and latency over SpaceX's proposed Starlink constellation, based on its FCC filings. It shows orbital shells, link topology and how inter-satellite routes could beat terrestrial fiber on long distances.

The winning demo from Revision 2015's oldskool competition, running on a real 1981 IBM PC with CGA at 4.77MHz. It uses extreme tricks to produce effects, graphics and sound far beyond what the hardware was thought capable of.

A one-minute visualization of a simulated ant colony in which ants follow pheromone trails, with the source code on GitHub. It shows emergent behavior arising from simple rules.

CNLohr maps Wi-Fi signal strength at high resolution by moving an ESP8266 on a CNC mill, then visualizes the 3D data in WebGL. The result shows interference patterns in space.

A NASA and Durham University supercomputer simulation suggesting the Moon may have formed within hours of a giant impact between Earth and a Mars-sized body. It is one of the highest-resolution giant-impact simulations run.

A short MIT Math Lab video showing millimetric droplets bouncing and walking across a vibrating fluid bath, guided by their own pilot waves. These droplets show diffraction, tunneling and quantized orbits, which were once thought to belong only to quantum systems.

A short research demo of Autonomous Intersection Management, a protocol in which self-driving cars reserve slots through an intersection instead of obeying signals or stop signs. It uses UT Austin's autonomous vehicle Marvin and a simulation to show cars crossing without stopping.

An animated, musical visualization of Conway's Game of Life showing patterns made in the Golly program.