Optikammer is an informative and beautifully crafted interactive experience that plots how optical curiosities of the 1800’s evolved into the precursors of animation and cinema.
Optikammer is one of those wonderful rarities that manages to make learning fun. It takes you on a journey that explains and gives interactive examples of how visual distortion and tricks of the eye observed as early as 1821 led to full animation of humans and animals as early as the 1880’s.
There are lots of cleverly implemented examples throughout, including some you’ll have seen before – such as the Thaumatrope (a disk with a cage on one side and a bird on the other) and there are more oddities such as the Phenakistoscope (a spinning disc-based viewer). Each example is accompanied by lots of interactive examples and some genuinely interesting information (such as a simple Thaumatrope would cost the average man a whole weeks wages).
Movies and animation are things we take for granted nowadays, but if you think for a moment about how the process is effectively tricking you into believing that a series of still images are moving then it’s quite remarkable. Optikammer does a fantastic job of exploring how these tricks of the eye evolved and the various inventive ways they were used in the earliest days of moving pictures. A beautifully crafted an eye-opening experience that we highly recommend checking out.
Controls: Arrow Keys – Movement
Available On: All Browsers
Gameplay Video: Here