Slashdot Mirror
Seeking a Ghost via Web Cam
dogberto writes "It seems that people are using a web cam for everything these days. Starting with a web cam to watch the daily lives of people in their rooms. Now, it seems that the folks at The Evansville Courier & Press have decided to install a video camera in the 114 year old Willard Library to give internet viewers a chance to spot the legendary ghost (a.k.a., the "Lady in Grey") via this Ghost Cam. CNN was the first I saw running an article. The Willard Library link gives some more background on the ghost.
"
But whatever you do, don't cross the beams.
The great JPEG Blur search of Halloween '99
BTW, I've already submitted my faked ghost sighting, I put my slashdot username on the picture and recommend any /.'ers with some time to waste to do the same. Damn it, we want verifiable ghost cams!
Some of you people need to chill. This is set up for fun. So what if the image quality is pretty bad and the pictures in their proof section aren't really that great quality. It's Halloween. Halloween is always a time for ghost stories and such. Instead of complaining about what's wrong with the site, think of the fun qualities of it and get in the spirit of Halloween dammit. Oh yeah, like Happy Halloween too and stuff.
Here's one situation for the use of a webcam:
Say you are a college student, and you are going home for the weekend. However, you also want to see what your rommate does with your stuff while you're gone. THAT, I think, is a much better use of a webcam than taking pictures of a library and then adding gaussian blurs in the shapes of people.
Now, I haven't tried this myself (yet) and I believe that taking jpegs every 5 seconds, even with checking for differences would fill up space pretty quickly given that if you have a curtain flapping next to the window that would generate enough motion to store the image... so don't try this without vast amounts of space.
-S
I saw Monica Lewinski going down on a Pink Elephant once. I'm a believer.
I have a cheapo USB QuickCam (waiting hopefully for kernel 2.4 and a driver) that I use when in Windoze. My desk is directly in front of a window (behind the cam) that the sun comes in. At certain points of the day, the cam picks up wierd "ghostly" images that are simply reflections and refractions of the light off other objects in the room playing off the camera lens. The images look remarkably like the table the "ghost" was sitting on if anyone looked at the proof page.
While that would explain a lot of stuff, I'm afraid the jury is still out on ghosts for me. Never believed in the stuff until I lived in my last house. Footsteps, doors opening themselves, and other assorted weirdness generally associated with haunted houses occurred daily. The all time best was when a deadbolted door we never used opened itself just out of sight. When we went to check it, the door was open and the bolt was still sticking out of the door. I'm keeping an open mind, but I'm glad I don't live there anymore.
Skippy
"False modesty is the refuge of the incompetent." - The Stainless Steel Rat
There are a lot of ways to post a photo that you have created but not stored, and still tell whether it was unmodified when you get a copy back from an untrusted reporter.
Off the top of my head,
Also, Photoshop has a digital signature filter which works on similar methods. I think it has lots of redundant information so that it won't break down with lossy compression (or even print-then-scan cycles). It was intended to FIND photos, not to DISCARD photos, that may be from a given source, such as porn CD-ROMs stockpiling illegal scans of Playboy (C) artwork.
[
why the hell are they always in academic institutions?!?!?! I suppose the buildings are old and thus chock full of explanations for the presences
Georgia Tech's Library is the perfect setting for a ghost story. When one first walks into the place, they feel a sense of age without glory, as if the building is in the process of dying. It is heightened by the creaky wood staircases, the cramped little restrooms set in odd places, and the sealed-off stairwell with water-corroded paint that can only be seen by looking out the right windows in another stairwell.
The bare flourescent light tubes are covered by parallel, flat plates in the shape of a half-arc that stick down like small guillotines. The large atrium formed by floors 1 and 2 of the West wing is duplicated on floors 3 and 4 (like the old identical-room-switcharoo trick). The building incorporates at least 6 different architectural styles among its operative stairwells: one of them is straight, small, narrow, and creaky; another is constructed like a huge, tomato-green spiraled tube that secretly snakes down towards the basement.
The East wing is two or three floors taller than the West wing, and from here one may peer down on the oldest of campus buildings. The light behaves differently on these floors... the sunlight traces shadows through ancient, hazed-over glass. Even when I stand there, beholding it with my own eyes, the scene appears impossibly faded, like one of grandma's wedding pictures (or maybe some JPEG compression artifacts).
The building has many secret places. Most striking are the many locked rooms that appear randomly scattered throughout the floor plans... their practical purposes forgotten. In this one particular room, statues and busts can be seen through the darkened glass. If I remember correctly, the entire top floor of the East Wing is closed to the public, accessible only to invisible research librarians.
Finally, the building stands at the highest geographical point on campus. "The Hill" was of strategic significance during the civil war battle that this region of Atlanta saw.
Funny, though... Nobody here is creative enough to make up any stories about it. That's Tech for you...
Stephen Bennett
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
The "proof" photos and the comments are what one can expect
from a site like this; someone with an imagination can look
at a poor quality photo and see anything. Anybody interested
in for real ghost photos, check out Dave Oester's excellent site at:
http://www.ghostweb.com
They are doing some *serious* work in that direction, and besides
archives of photos, also offer a wealth of info.
how much you wanna bet people start superimposing images of ghosts or whatever on it (i'm talking actually doing a decent job, working with translucency, etc) and saying they plucked it off the site and were the first to see it? aye. seems kinda ridiculous to me to even put one up, but i guess it's a decent way to generate page impressions.
--
you must amputate to email me
i read all replies to my comments
I recall there was even an episode of a Nickelodeon show about that very library... Maybe it really is haunted! :-) Webcams really are everywhere though... I ran into a site with a camera in the same building I was in a few days ago, and the people on the other end of it came looking for me when they saw my IP connect. It's a very scary thing when the person on the other side of the web appears in real life - maybe this ghost thing will be cooler than I thought!
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to find the URL for the Loch Ness web cam.
This page has pictures that people have submitted who claim to have spotted the ghost. Having made every effort to try not to be overly cynical, I must say that those pictures combined with their comments make for the dumbest reading ever. This would likely be more interesting to an individual with vision impairment than it is to me, because I can clearly see that there isn't a ghost.. they'd have to squint or take the ignorant folks' words for it. People appear to be seeing ghosts in the graphic compression algorithm (blocky images in certain places), not to mention some outright hallucination.
At first glance it seems as though this is some public service to people who are ghost-seeking folks. But, then you scroll down and see ad banners and (at least to me) it all clicks. They want tons of people to spend their entire day sitting on their web site looking at the "ghost cam" as it refreshes every 30 seconds, building up tons of impressions. Okay, don't think I'm pretending that 90% of Slashdot readers didn't realize this.. but for those of you who are too skeptical to even go look at the Ghost Cam (or when everyone wakes up in the morning in the US and the site dies), I think my explanation is pretty valid.
Another thing that's interesting is that all of the "comments" on the proof page seem strikingly similar. Without knowing anything else I'd say that most of them were fabricated. Who knows? I think I have an extreme aversion to anything on the Net with a central theme of "ghosts". Except maybe GhostView.
I'd be surprised if any real ghosts show up, but I wouldn't be very surprised to see people doing the usual sorts of things in front of it. Or doing unusual sorts of things, at least for the location ;)
Ghost cams have been around for quite a while now, some other interesting ones are @
GhostWatch
Ghostwatcher
I believe there is even a Loch-ness monster cam @
"Offical Lochness Site
Someday, we'll look back on this, laugh nervously and change the subject.
I've heard my fair share of ghost stories - why the hell are they always in academic institutions?!?!?! I suppose the buildings are old and thus chock full of explanations for the presences. In any event, I'd be curious to know whether the folks running the webcam actually hold on to the pictures themselves for comparison purposes when someone sends in a potentially edited "evidence" image.
;-)
Chances are it's a celebration of photoshop, not a ghost.
OH MY GOD I JUST SAW THE LADY IN GRAY!!!! She's right over there, on that blurry spot... oh wait, maybe the webcam's images are just pretty grainy and low quality.
/. readers should try tampering just to see if they get posted as real proof.
:) (just like every geek I know who gets a new webcam)
Seriously, I really doubt that any of these images found can be drawn to an exact conclusion. First of all, the camera simply doesn't provide suffcient quality images for one to really verify the presence of a ghost. Also, I looked at the "proof" section and noticed nothing out of the ordinary in any of the pictures. Maybe this was because these pictures were even more blurry and grainy the live webcam shots, but all I saw were random colored arrows pointing to blurs.
And as someone said earlier, how do they judge whether a picture is fit for proof or not? I bet you could easily blur or anti-alias a section in photoshop, draw a few colored lines around it, post, and you'd have yourself a spot on the page. I think some of us
Yeah I know this is mainly a little just for fun project, but still I'd like to see some level of realism here. Maybe it's just years of watching Unsolved Mysteries, but I think paranormal investigation is an interesting (even if it seems like a crock) field and should be given some credit. A bunch of random people posting blurry quickcam shots isn't going to prove anything, rather it would further damage the credibility of any legitimate efforts to locate paranormal activity (I think there are some, regardless whether the activity is really ghostly or logically explained).
Oh well, I bet there is no ghost in the library, because by now she would definitely have gone up to the camera and gave everybody the finger in an attempt to look leet.
This is one of the funniest links that I have seen in some time. I got a great laugh out of it. I realize that a substantial part of the population (American and otherwise) believes in the existance of ghosts.
However, if you read Carl Sagan's "The Demon Haunted World Science as a Candle in the Dark", specifically the chapter on "baloney detection"...
I think that you will see that this is bunk. People that cannot apply skeptical thinking to things such as these frighten me more than the existance of a real ghost would!
Fortunatly, there seem to be a good number of skeptics on Slashdot.
But on a lighter note: Its all hallows eve! So we might as well have fun with it.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
A BOOKSHELF
The books start to slide forward then the whole shelving
unit topples over and almost crushes the team under a ton of
books. They jump to safety.
VENKMAN
Nice.
(out loud)
Hello...
Spengler looks at his meters and silently points at a dark
aisle intersecting the one they're in. The team inches toward
it.
SPENGLER
It's here.
They stop at the corner.
INT. THE DARK AISLE -- DAY
The team peeks around the corner and looks toward
camera.
THEIR POV -- DAY
An ethereal presence is hovering between the stacks about
four feet off the ground. It seems to waver on the edge of
being and non-being, then a large legless, headless torso
begins to emerge.
At least one of these pictures (blurry near the camera) really looks pretty good. I can see the arms holding a paper on the desk. Enlarge it in The Gimp if you have to, and compare it to any other picture. I did.
Of course, it could be faked. It looks like there's nothing to stop that. But I checked it against another file, the JPEG headers look the same (creator info and stuff) and the file size jives, too. So maybe it's real. Or maybe everyone uses Photoshop to fake their ghost pictures. :)
---
pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
You may be to explain away the ghostly shadows, but try to explain how the camera ... ended up pointing in a different direction one day!!!!!! It's inexplicable! I'm starting to believe that there's really something out there!
It's actually quite amusing, because most of the "ghost" proof photos are really just very common jpeg compression and aliasing artifacts. I see stuff like that all the time when working on low bandwidth graphic designs: Look! That (--edited out for legal reasons--) company logo is waving at me!
Heh, maybe it'll be revealed to be just another boring webcam that some cracker changed the URL to make into a ghostcam. Any cam is a ghostcam if you really try.
"Whoa man, did you see that spook in the Voyerdorm's bathroom? Yeah right there by Jamie's butt!"
Most of the ghosts look more like JPEG artifacts (eg. ringing and smoothing) than actual ghosts. To make this a serious endeavor, they need to take the IR filter off the camera and set the JPEG quality factor to maximum.
The rest look like they were done in Photoshop. One of them has such sharp lines on the "blurry ghost area" that it seems to be a rather obvious fake. (If the blurry area were that sharply delineated in real life, then there would've been more artifacts in the JPEG.)
Given the nature of it all, this looks more like a PR stunt than anything else. Welcome to the Web 1999!
--Joe --Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I just remember reading Michael Crichton's Rising Sun which went into detail on image analysis etc as it related to video. The image would not be 'still' in the sense that even if nothing is happening on screen, due to the technologies, there will be inherent 'movement'. There are algorithms available which will allow real movement to be detected and so on.
JPG is a pathetic format for something like this which (being a bit of a skeptic myself) a skeptic could easily tear apart. At least bump the quality up to maximum. Having said that, I haven't seen any TIFF cameras around lately. :)
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
It actually does neither of these as lots of old granite buildings (or whatever material it was) have no ghostly history and it ignores the photo evidence. Needless to say the jury is still very much out.
If they had intended to make the webcam accurate, they would have used a form of encryption and data stamping - if not several.
Besides, if they were truely interested in discovering this ghost, a web cam is not an accurate way to do so, with ~20 second gaps between shots on some. A security camera would be more efficient. Technology is fun and great, but when it's not the most practical application to get the job done... use the least common denominator.
I mean, how many web cams have absolutely NOTHING happening, while there's someone 2 feet to the left of the camera, working on their computer? I'm sure it happens often.
And considering that ghosts haven't been known to stop by for tea, the likelyhood of a ghost being caught digitally are even more slim. I mean, they're called 'ghost sitings', not 'ghost visitations'...
I personally think that there are spirits out there in some shape or form, but rarely manefest themselves in the physical. (MHO)
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Okay, if they were REALLY trying to catch this bastardly little ghost, then why aren't there ANY fraud protection in place to prevent it... I mean, really, I could stick a picture of Mickey Mouse in there at this point, at a little gaussian blur, crank down the opacity, and voila... instant ghost.
Anyway, it would be so easy to prevent this from happening, it's as if they don't care. First and foremost, time-stamp all the images. Duh.. Secondly, (and they had BETTER be doing this already) recording the feed on location, or AT LEAST archiving each image that gets posted to the web.
With these two SIMPLE procedures in place, in the event of a really convincing shot, it will give them the ability to see if the shot being submitted is at least the same shot as the one that was on the web, without any altering.
PS - Maybe it's just me, but the circles and arrows and whatnot bugged the hell out of me... If there HAD been something there, I wouldn't have seen it because it was already too grainy WITHOUT the distracting yellow indicators. Also, I really don't think I saw anything ghost-worthy. One pic with a blur close to the camera was okay, but coulda been faked far too easily..
Heres a solution:
Write a program. The program could use an existing picture of good quality, then download new images and compare. If there is a block pixel change (a square of x size, having all pixels changed) then, the new image is flagged. Else, the image is thrown away. The resulting "ghost pictures" can be inverted in Photoshop, it will be obvious which ones were camera caused an which were not...
This would rule out human interpretation, and could be used over a long period of time. What do you think?
Biguser@hotmail.com
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Even with firing up PSP and splitting it into CMYK and HSL channels(Predator's point of view almost), i really cant see any ghost they are talking about. It looks just like JPEG artifacts. They really should of used PNG and a larger image. Hmm. Interesting to look for the ghosts though.