I told you that our first mini-contest was going to be a hard nut, and it certainly took some odd technical thinking to crack it. Amazingly enough, 8 folks found out the solution, which is (drum roll)…
A spinning cube!
Here’s where it is hidden: the animated line drawing is rendered into a sequence of XY coordinate pairs, which in turn are stored in the left and right channels of the audio file, respectively. In order to display the message, you have to connect both channels to an oscilloscope in XY mode, which is basically how many old video games used to work. The result can also be seen in software, e.g. using the Winamp AVS plugin (see 3rd picture below).
Some folks even sent renderings, and I took the liberty of adding two older ones from my own archives. Guess which :)
So, the winners are:
- GuidoJ (Germany), who wins an N64 plugin for his Retrode (once I’ve got it done), and a T-shirt for his brother
- KevinC (USA), who wins a T-shirt
- DavidG (USA), who doesn’t have a Retrode and doesn’t want a shirt, so he wins a bunch of cryptic Japanese Super Famicom RPG carts :)
Congratulations to everyone who found out! Hope you enjoyed the quiz.
Any chance for a download link of the AVS script?
Of course. Here you go
Yeehaw!
Winamp!!!! :D
I finally got it it thanks to your oscilloscope / Soundbooth hint ;)
Uhm, for all others – no cheating involved here. I was not giving him any exclusive hint; just repeated two words he had dropped earlier :)
The moment of discovery was really amazing. Awesome contest, and Thanks!
I am curious, and figure others are too, how did you create the signal initially? (what programs if any, etc.)
C++ and any MP3 encoder.
Noooooo! I wouldn’t've gotten it for a long time anyway.
Nice one guys!