HN Explorer

Show HN: Silent Poems – Visual expression of unspoken thoughts (silentpoems.net)

121 points by laviniap ↗ HN
An interactive digital art project that turns typed text into flowing, abstract animated symbols. The symbols connect fluidly, much like handwriting, but in an entirely abstract way. Each letter has its own design, and then each instance of the letter has a different seed such that you have slight differences - the same as with handwriting.

27 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 65.0 ms ] thread
sroussey
Does not work on mobile (can not type)
laviniap
yes, it's a known issue unfortunately. I couldn't get it to bring up the keyboard (I tried even with a hidden text field) hopefully you can try it on desktop
miwaniza
Click on the question mark at top left twice. Helped on iPhone
laviniap
ah great tip, this works for me too (chrome on iOS)
smusamashah
This is so beautiful. The animations are dynamic, love how every single letter animates dynamically making itself different even if repeated.

Minor problems unless they are intentional: I can't hold on a key and let it type e.g. can't press and hold backspace to clear all text.

When reached at the end, can still type but the text becomes invisible. can't scroll and see that.

laviniap
thank you so much! some of that indeed are small bugs that I overlooked, I'll try to fix them soon. the typing of one key at a time is on purpose (this project is meant to be used "in real life" in combination with an analogue typewriter)
barbazoo
Beautiful, nice work, I bet that was fun!
laviniap
hehe yes indeed, making it was a really nice flow
dmje
Love it, amazing work. Was about to ask you to enable a downloadable image and then right clicked and found you can download the image :-)
greeniskool
If you press tab, then Ctrl+A then backspace, you can delete the help icon.

Very cute website, I really like how every glyph looks, some more abstract than others.

westcoast49
I imagine this could be sold to upscale hotels or concert arenas, for display on a big screen in a reception area or foyer.
laviniap
ha definitely fancier than I had in mind! :D thank you
myfonj
I think it could be neat to leverage ligatures, i.e. preceding glyph could either affect the seed of the next or even make different "cursive" connecting swashes. Words could become pictures with individual "glyphs" blended together.
laviniap
that's such a cool idea, I'll play around with it. right now each symbol is independent of its neighbors (except for the bezier curves piecing them together)
dleink
and then as long as we're doing logic on variations, the time between keypresses definitely varies.
myfonj
And maybe also the press duration; even with preserved auto-repeat, there seems to be quite a variety in typing: getting duration from key-down to key-up between 30 and 120 milliseconds. Naturally we can "squeeze" it up to auto-repeat threshold, which is usually around 500 ms.

What surprised me is how often I have concurrently pressed two or more keys during typing, never occurred to me how frequently key press of the next key happens before the previous key was released. It could also be interesting signal perhaps.)

E: key press duration measurements doodle: https://codepen.io/myf/full/KwPwVWE

AstroJetson
This was fun, I liked playing with it.

I'd like to ask for a feature that I can pass a query string

wwww.silentpoems.net?poem=How+do+I+love+thee%3F+Let+me+count+the+ways.+I+love+thee+to+the+depth+and+breadth+and+height+My+soul+can+reach%2C+when+feeling+out+of+sight+For+the+ends+of+being+and+ideal+grace.

and have the poem rendered. That way I can send poems to my beloved.