I gave Opus 5.5 one prompt and six hours to visualize Invisible Cities

stared

Interactive demo: https://p.migdal.pl/invisible-cities-opus-5.5/ Source code: https://github.com/stared/invisible-cities-opus-5.5

andrew-v

I was finishing Invisible Cities yesterday, because the book was due at my local library today. I was wondering whether the cities could be adapted into some visual art form. And obviously I thought about feeding it to Opus. 24 hours later, I see this post…

dhruv_kernlai

$74 vs $ 10 vs $25 for the same prompt, The interesting number is not actually quality, its what we can get per dollar like 6 subagents runs in parallel.

glinkot

The creation really is amazing. I harnet heard of the book but got a long way through it!

konart

Cecilia looks like an average residential area in Russia.

pama

Loads nothing on iphone lockdown mode fwiw.

SiempreViernes

The first city I clicked on at random had the opening phrase: > Arriving, you rejoice at its bridges, each different The model city had like five bridges total, three of which were didn't bridge anything at all but instead sat in the middle of the river and went along its flow, the "bridges" for some reason pretending to be small islands.

droidjj

If you haven’t read the book yet, I’m tempted to warn you against opening the visualization. Part of the joy of reading this book is letting your mind’s eye run wild, and I fear if I read it for the first time after toying with this site, I’d be remembering the cities rather than conjuring them.

user43928

Funny note about Opus 5.5. I once instructed it to spawn at most 20 subagents and it spawned 40, with an adversarial reviewer for each of the 20. It doesn't follow these instructions very well.

sreekanth850

Does this bring any happiness? for me, No. effort need a purpose.

tuesdaynight

It reminds me of Total War. The soundtrack and way that the map is shown. Is Total War an inspiration? Anyways, I liked the visualization. But I never read the book, so I followed (partly) droidjj recommendation

camillovisini

A couple of years ago, after reading the book, I sketched some of them on Procreate with an isometric grid, but not all 55. I only arrived at number 4, since each took multiple hour... https://camillovisini.com/drawing/fc4jc6-le-citta-invisibili... https://camillovisini.com/drawing/p2yrdj-le-citta-invisibili...

amelius

If you're going to spend tokens on 3D stuff, then please build me a better FreeCAD first.

jordemort

I ran cat /dev/urandom for six hours but I didn't need to write a blog post about it

uludag

Invisible Cities is my favorite piece of literature hands down. The audiobook narrated by Richard Higgins is also done so beautifully and can't recommend it more. As neat as this project is, this does no justice to whatsoever to the book. On the surface Invisible Cities seems to be a book about random cities' descriptions. In reality though, this book is about semiotics, meaning, language, and it's limits.

sitzkrieg

both the linked camera lens example as well as the last one the author linked runs at ~5fps on vivaldi and pegs CPU 100%. i have never seen any 3d visualization website have performance this bad, i assume they're not using webgl given my GPU is 0% utilization.

armcat

This is probably one amazing positive these models have brought forward - the ability to break out of a single modality, and utilise others to help us learn and visualise. While the visuals here are amazing, my son for example prefers to learn by listening and talking, so we convert lot of his study materials into audio and real-time voice roleplay.

getpokedagain

Doesn't work right on my phone. Vanadium (chrome) https://imgur.com/a/nGLyJf6

swiftcoder

I'm a little torn by this sort of demonstration, because while many of the scenes have obvious markers of slop (impossible intersecting geometry, bridges to nowhere, and so on), the scenes largely do work to convey the intended concept/emotion, and the low-poly aesthetic is executed decently well. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that another visual medium is starting to fall to LLMs after the success of diffusion models for image generation. Nevertheless it's wild that a mostly text-focussed model is building little worlds like these.

moralestapia

What a beautiful website, wow. I've been online 10,000s of hours, have seen pretty much everything and this one goes straight in my Top 10. I'm so glad I'm able to witness this Cambrian explosion of software :).