Pointer Pointer (2012)

Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago

surprisetalk

244 points

31 comments

pointerpointer.comTech/culturestory

calmpositive

Debate

20/100

NostalgiaWeb DevelopmentInteractive Art

Key topics

Nostalgia

Web Development

Interactive Art

The 'Pointer Pointer' website, launched in 2012, is a nostalgic interactive art project that reveals images as users move their mouse, sparking discussions on its creation, technology, and cultural significance.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

Discussion Activity

Active discussion

First comment

11d

Peak period

Day 12

Avg / period

10.3

Comment distribution31 data points

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Based on 31 loaded comments

Key moments

01Story posted
Oct 9, 2025 at 8:42 AM EDT
3 months ago
Step 01
02First comment
Oct 20, 2025 at 3:26 AM EDT
11d after posting
Step 02
03Peak activity
16 comments in Day 12
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Step 03
04Latest activity
Oct 23, 2025 at 1:09 PM EDT
3 months ago
Step 04

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Discussion (31 comments)

Showing 31 comments

pjerem

3 months ago

2 replies

This one is an old one. I still love it, now with nostalgia. I always wondered how they got all those pictures. It looks like there is a recurrent theme tho.

kilroy123

3 months ago

1 reply

I too felt a ton of nostalgia for this one. I recently featured it in my newsletter: https://randomdailyurls.com.

If you're into this kind of stuff there's lot of new and old gems.

ajoel24

3 months ago

Subscribed! Thanks for creating this newsletter.

dlenski

3 months ago

It's fun indeed!

The theme seems to be something like "college students at house parties"… reminds me very much of my friends and the photos we took at around this age.

JRCharney

3 months ago

1 reply

Can you make a version with cats in it? Like cats jumping at the cursor or trying to catch the cursor with their paws.

yapyap

3 months ago

I don’t see why not, go for it

eknkc

3 months ago

2 replies

Since this is old, I assume someone found these photos and then manually selected the pointer location. Maybe used openCV or something like that.. But I'd most likely go with manual.

There are 700+ images defined in https://pointerpointer.com/new-positions.json and the script finds the closest match to the current mouse pointer.

sky2224

3 months ago

1 reply

Yeah probably. It likely made it significantly easier given that the images are always super zoomed in, so a single finger pointing covers roughly 6-8 mouse pointer locations (I'm kind of eye-balling it here).

GuB-42

3 months ago

The images are also shifted to match the mouse pointer exactly, easier to notice near the edges.

1-more

3 months ago

1 reply

710. Did a binary search on the URLs. Didn't look at the JS, whoops.

tomjakubowski

3 months ago

1 reply

You often don't even have to read any JS to find these things. Check the network tab, maybe filter by application/json.

1-more

3 months ago

JS as a synecdoche for JS and everything it requests. I may be the only person who says that. I may be asking you to read my mind. Unfair. Ah well.

SeanAnderson

3 months ago

1 reply

This is apparently from 2012, but I could've sworn it was older than that.

Sesse__

3 months ago

I thought so, too, but I checked my IRC logs and it was discussed in 2012–2015 but never before that.

agys

3 months ago

1 reply

This is an old project by Studio Moniker (Amsterdam)… I was once at a presentation of their work at Resonate in Belgrade (memories…) and they explained that the slight delay before the reveal of the underlying image is added artificially to add a bit of drama.

Btw, the correct image is loaded through a Voronoi diagram.

throwaway127482

3 months ago

Conspiracy theory: that explanation is a lie, and the real reason for the delay is that it helps hide the fact that there isn't a unique image mapped to each pixel. If you click two pixels very close together, it shows the same image, but slightly shifted to exactly match your pointer. If the images were displayed immediately, it would be much more obvious what's going on.

petercooper

3 months ago

1 reply

Paul Irish explained the basics of how it works here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2ZXW2HBLPM

I wonder if you could create something similar nowadays using generative AI but with the finger in a very specific location without pregenerating thousands of images.

syx

3 months ago

Very interesting explanation, I've always wondered how it was built, I didn't know Paul Irish made a video about this. Thanks for sharing!

slmjkdbtl

3 months ago

1 reply

How do they acquire these images?

Sohcahtoa82

3 months ago

Probably harvested from MySpace and Facebook.

TealMyEal

3 months ago

1 reply

It's funny, im sure to Millennials this is jsut some nostalga to a simpler internet but I find seeing old dorm rooms and random slices of life from more than a decade ago really intresting, from the fashion to the red eyes from the flash. half of these photos look like they could appear on a modern Lo-Fi album cover

kevstev

3 months ago

I thought the same. It made me wonder where they sourced the photos from, almost looks like they sourced it from webshots or a similar site in the mid 2000s. It was nice to see people just being caught in happy moments, and made me realize how much "content" on social these days is so highly curated and posed.

dack

3 months ago

1 reply

I didn't like that there was a long delay after you move your mouse, and since all the calculation happens on the frontend, i figured you could easily make it ~instantly update and follow you around. So i (well, claude) made a version that does that and i think it's more fun. here's the code you can paste into the console at pointerpointer.com: https://pastebin.com/f7YqQNxg

internetguy

3 months ago

this is pretty cool, it seems they reuse every image by translating it a little when your cursor is within a range

senfiaj

3 months ago

How does it work? Does it contain all the possible images with al the possible pointer positions? Does it do some corrections, such as rotation or shift to the original image?

JimDabell

3 months ago

Along similar lines:

> On May 4th, 2007, we asked internet users to help isolate Michael Jackson's white glove in all 10,060 frames of his nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean. 72 hours later 125,000 gloves had been located. wgt_data_v1.txt (listed below) is the culmination of data collected.

— https://www.whiteglovetracking.com

lacoolj

3 months ago

Mildly too addicting for me

Gotta get back to work

atoav

3 months ago

I think this was created by the people at the art collective of monochrom.at,

This is where I have seen this the first time ca. 2006.

Edit: Now that I searched for it I only found their project ZeigerPointer, where they collect such images, maybe I mixed it up.

yapyap

3 months ago

good old web2 fun

muzani

3 months ago

I'm surprised how well this works on mobile. I thought the photos would be distorted at least.

keepamovin

3 months ago

This is hilarious. I thought it was gonna be one of those pointer animation nightmares, and I was going to regret clicking on it, but I still kind of wanted to click on it anyway. But actually, it’s really funny and amazing to think about how you created it.

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