DLRC Announces nuTilt

So, DLRC is instituting a new feature to show coins more dynamically. Here is the link to their announcement:

https://blog.davidlawrence.com/introducing-nutilt/

I would say this is a natural outgrowth of the Covid-19 lockdowns that has spurred people to invest and innovate.

 

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Neat but I will be curious to see if it takes off and we see it on facebook, Instagram, and so on or if the curiosity dies and only DL uses it.

There has been a lot of coin apps that seem to come and go.

 

Does the same thing to me that the poster on here who animates his pics...ie, makes me slightly ill. Can't stand them although I can see the purpose behind doing so

 

I love it. Gives me a very natural view of the coins.

And it sounds like if you are viewing it on the app on your phone, you'll actually be able to tilt your phone and it will change the view. So, you can basically swirl the coin image just like you would a real coin (in a slab). It doesn't have to be all the way around either - many times, we like to just look at the light playing on a small bit of the coin, looking for rub or hairlines.

This is one of the best innovations in online/imaging technology in a long time - if it works properly on the phone.

 

In terms of the app itself itll like remain around or get sold. The idea has been kicked around a lot for many years to have more dynamic pictures of videos. Would be a huge win for them if they could sell it to a TPG.

Regardless it's great to have another entity pushing innovation and understanding the future of the hobby will involve much more technology and internet sales

 

This feature makes me dizzy... why not simply provide 2 or 3 set of pictures?

 

Hey...you CAN copy 'n paste it...

 

If you go to the website and load the actual images, the rotation is much slower and easier to view than these gifs. You can also turn it off and then control it with your mouse (basically, drag to tilt).

 

I’d rather have a single set or two sets of good quality (accurate) pictures than a “moving” set of sub-par photos.

This has been tried before. Not sure why it would stick this time.

 

I like the idea. The sample images move too quickly in my opinion. However, when clicking on one from an auction link, the speed is slower.

It's often nice to have more info on a coin (whether it be a video or one of these images) and I appreciate that DLRC is giving this a try.

 

I like the speed for the most part as if it slows to much you kinda lost the purpose. I hope they do it for most of their auctions and sales, but do agree that it's nice to see innovation happening.

 

@RonSanderson

 

We seem to have opinions all over the map. To those who get dizzy when looking at my animations, I apologize. To those who like them, thanks.

But there are tradeoffs and choices even in simple photos, and I think a dedicated application could resolve them to everyone’s satisfaction.

The existing image formats still leave a lot to be desired. If you animate using a GIF file you are limited to 256 colors per frame. To make a GIF an algorithm will try to find the best match of the color of each pixel. This is complex - the 256 colors need to be optimally computed so the overall divergence from accurate color across each pixel is minimized. Even an 800x800 image has 640,000 pixels, so we are potentially trying to reduce 640,000 unique colors down to 256. If the image is bigger, there are likely even finer gradations of color to be reduced.

A GIF, therefore, is a poor representation of the color subtleties on a coin. In an attempt to reduce file size, the image is often downsized, so actual detail is sacrificed as well.

My compromise is to post a GIF and individual still photos that have higher resolution and better color accuracy.

There are better and newer formats, but they are not universally supported in all web browsers - and for that matter are not file types that can be uploaded to CoinTalk. I would have explored these to get better, smaller animations, but it seems pointless if they cannot be shown.

Finally, there are tradeoffs about how the animation shows the coin. I have gone with a tilting period of 1.1 seconds, using 9 frames showing for about .12 seconds. I chose these values after some experimentation. I felt that tipping a coin or slab in hand took about a second, but in practice one second was just a little too fast. Nine frames gives a smooth animation, and gives an illusion of continuous motion of light across the coin.

But those are parameters that satisfy my brain. Then may not satisfy yours.

A dedicated app could use any type of data file it wanted to. I can see tagging each photo with the angular direction of the light sources. The data file could contain a number of frames, and use an advanced data compression algorithm that only stores the differences between each frame, to keep the size under control. Lets say you took 36 pictures at 10 degree intervals or even 72 photos at 5 degrees.

A phone app could detect the phone tilt and display the appropriate picture that is lit from that angle. (In reality there are probably 3 fixed light positions and the coin and camera rotate together underneath them. That’s what I do.)

Unlike the frames in a GIF, the app would not need to time how long to show the image. That is determined by how fast you are tilting the phone. When you tilt to a new angle, the image is replaced. As a result, you can choose how fast the frames replace each other, so you would not have the dizzy feeling you may be feeling from my efforts.

Of course, if you control the contents of the file, you can do away with limits of color compression that plague GIF files. The dedicated phone app can show photos of any resolution - it just shows them in quick succession.

For my part, I am glad to see this. I am posting animations here, in part, to see if we can raise our expectations. I can only go so far myself. My employment contract as a software developer includes standard boilerplate that all my innovations become my employer’s intellectual property.

Even though designing a new file format and writing a phone application would be a lot of fun, I could not market or distribute it. I needed someone to take my animations to the next level, and I think DLRC and NuTilt have done that.

That makes me happy to see. I’d be even happier if I have had some influence on showing what could be done. But that would be gravy.

 

I like @RonSanderson's animations better than what I am seeing at DL's site. The nuTilt animations go round and round continuously. Ron's go back and forth, and that makes all the difference to keep from making you dizzy. I can't watch DL's for more than a second or two.

 

I checked out a couple of the nuTilt images on DL's website. They indeed gave me a bit of trouble, and I think I figured out why...

 

The difference is, when the app comes out it will rotate as you tilt your phone. You control how much it rotates, and you can make it go back and forth just like holding a slab in your hand. That's the innovation here... not just that they have gifs.

 

It’s good and a big step forward, but they don’t have it quite right yet. But I give them big credits for trying. It appears they have an offset light revolving around the coin, or alternately, light is fixed and coin plus camera rotate. Not much tilting. Only 4 angles of rotation in manual mode. No real manual control of tilt, but you can pause the auto-swirl. What’s needed is a fixed angle light with the user having the ability to tilt and rotate the coin in tiny steps, same as done when grading with coin in fingers. This is much tougher and more time-consuming to program. Basically, the coin has to be recorded and indexed when put through all rotations and reasonable tilt angles. This can be done robotically. Then an interactive program needs to be able to bring up any tilt angle and rotation the user wants from the recording.

For those who find it dizzying, continually tap the pause/play button for auto-swirl at a rate you are happy with.

Cal

 

A light "dome" could do the trick, but would still not provide tilt. To do what @physics-fan3.14 says the app will do would require some very interesting automation.

 

Ive seen a few people on here and on instagram that already do this. Makes me slightly dizzy staring at it though haha.

 

@messydesk was experimenting with this type of "animated" photography, gosh - probably 10 years ago?

The gif format itself has a lot of limitations (as mentioned above) - but I believe the animated images also just never caught on because if you take good photos of the coin, maybe 2 or 3 different views - you don't need all of this hassle of capturing 2 dozen images and stacking them together in a loop.

Makes me nauseous ...