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.
"
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!
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
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 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.
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.
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!
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
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.