I appreciate the effort but, this in many ways showcases the design problems of today that put form over function: high score for the FX, low score for usability.
I have no idea what is going on or what is supposed to be going on. I opened up the console to see error messages, but there were none. But I'm pretty sure it's not rendering the way it's supposed to.
This is fricking awesome. It's the coolest thing I've seen on HN for a while. Love it!
N.B. I visit HN multiple times per day. I've been a member of HN since 2010. My last comment was made in 2018. I logged in for the first time in years just to make this comment :-)
“Nothing to watch” is actually well solved by LLMs. Just give them a list of your favourite films and ask for some less known of films which are in a similar vein.
An ocean of film posters is a cool visualization but doesn’t solve the problem well.
Anyone else remember Microsoft Silverlight? When it came out, they had a C# & Silverlight published demo that was a movie library viewer similar to this -- not as nice, but good for its time (circa 2007).
Somehow I swirled around for a minute or so and didn't see anything I would want to watch.
"This gallery features a collection of the 50,000 most popular* movies according to TMDB"
Yeah, there's the problem. I went to the TMDB site and tried sorting by popularity, rating … all I got was a whole bunch of recent films that look like all the reasons the film industry is crashing (you know, the kind of stuff you would see in a Red Box when they were still a thing).
If you really don't know what to watch you could do a lot worse than checking off films on this list (the 1001 Movies to See Before You Die):
(And you have already seen a number of them I expect.)
Elitist? Maybe. But if you can actually get through the list (I've been at it, casually, for several years now) you'll feel like you have acquired a film school degree.
I think it's fine to watch "8 ½" and hate it — at least you'll know that you hate it now. But it would be sad if you never saw "La Strada" because you thought all of Fellini's films were impenetrable.
"Marty", "Stella Dallas", "The Hustler" — just a few great American films that came to mind that I would have otherwise missed…
But if the latest Guardian of the Pirate's of the Marvel Universe movie are your cup of tea you probably have no problem finding something to watch anyway and can pass on "The List".
When I don't know what do watch I simply check the list of Criterion Films and pick the first one that I recognize the title but haven't watched yet. So far it has worked very well for me.
Some time ago, I wanted to create a website that would recommend movies based on rating from people whom you have similar movie ratings with but I was unable to get the necessary data as existing websites guard it. But it would be nice to finally have a functioning movie recommendation engine one day...
As someone with Tripophobia I really, really didn't like the "depth" option, but otherwise like the idea; seems like it could do with showing more of the posters and titles though as at one point about 10 flipped by in a second before I could read more than one or two of the titles and saw nothing but a blur for the posters.
I love it. The UX is terrible but the visualization is very "outside the box". Experiments like this are important on the road to finding novel interfaces. Not everything has to look like a v0 shadcn app. Thank you for sharing!
We created this as a demo for OpenSearch on AWS (we are AWS partners) but I really enjoyed making it and I thought it turned out to be really fun.
Took the same type of dataset at the OP (I think we have 80,000 posters) but we used AWS’ multimodal embedding model to enable semantic search across the posters, as well as the ability to do a similarity search based on the posters.
Eventually we will include AWS’ personalize as part of the service to show off some of the movie recommendation engine features they developed.
Not commercialized there’s definitely some bugs, we built it for fun
Whoa, the first film poster it presented to me was for Koyaanisqatsi, a 1982 film I was unfamiliar with until I saw it in a Metafilter post just this morning[1]. Baader-Meinhof in action[2].
I think shows and movies used to feel more special back when media was harder to access. We had to wait for them to air on TV, and if we missed them, that was it. The scarcity made watching them more exciting and meaningful. Now that everything is instantly available, it all feels cheap and disposable. In my opinion, this is one of the reasons streaming services will eventually fail. If they want to survive, they need to find a way to bring back that sense of anticipation and urgency.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 50.9 ms ] threadIt should be communicated in a clearer way.
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Once in depth mode I saw movie posters but it zoomed out until they where gone.
N.B. I visit HN multiple times per day. I've been a member of HN since 2010. My last comment was made in 2018. I logged in for the first time in years just to make this comment :-)
An ocean of film posters is a cool visualization but doesn’t solve the problem well.
"This gallery features a collection of the 50,000 most popular* movies according to TMDB"
Yeah, there's the problem. I went to the TMDB site and tried sorting by popularity, rating … all I got was a whole bunch of recent films that look like all the reasons the film industry is crashing (you know, the kind of stuff you would see in a Red Box when they were still a thing).
If you really don't know what to watch you could do a lot worse than checking off films on this list (the 1001 Movies to See Before You Die):
https://1001films.fandom.com/wiki/The_List
(And you have already seen a number of them I expect.)
Elitist? Maybe. But if you can actually get through the list (I've been at it, casually, for several years now) you'll feel like you have acquired a film school degree.
I think it's fine to watch "8 ½" and hate it — at least you'll know that you hate it now. But it would be sad if you never saw "La Strada" because you thought all of Fellini's films were impenetrable.
"Marty", "Stella Dallas", "The Hustler" — just a few great American films that came to mind that I would have otherwise missed…
But if the latest Guardian of the Pirate's of the Marvel Universe movie are your cup of tea you probably have no problem finding something to watch anyway and can pass on "The List".
It seems that there are different "editions" of the list, where new films are entered and some are removed, to keep the count constant.
We created this as a demo for OpenSearch on AWS (we are AWS partners) but I really enjoyed making it and I thought it turned out to be really fun.
Took the same type of dataset at the OP (I think we have 80,000 posters) but we used AWS’ multimodal embedding model to enable semantic search across the posters, as well as the ability to do a similarity search based on the posters.
Eventually we will include AWS’ personalize as part of the service to show off some of the movie recommendation engine features they developed.
Not commercialized there’s definitely some bugs, we built it for fun
[1] https://www.metafilter.com/209750/Godfrey-Reggios-Koyaanisqa...
[2] https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomeno...