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

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

stared

Comments (128)

  • 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...
  • potomushto
    I understand why that’s impressive. But I don’t feel much. I guess, I was just used to envy how much people can be absorbed by some idea to spend so much time implementing it. Now it feels like a single shotted nice-typography-and-all presentation at work that someone did 10 min before the meeting.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • SiempreViernes
    The first city I clicked on at random had the opening phrase:> Arriving, you rejoice at its bridges, each differentThe 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.
  • wsowens
    Like many other people in this thread, I feel like passing what would essentially be a hobby project off to Claude robs the creator of most the fulfillment and gives the viewer less reason to appreciate it. But with the models being as good as they are today, I genuinely feel conflicted. If your end goal is to share something with others, why spend a weekend on a project like this when you could just hand it off to Claude?
  • Joker_vD
    Kublai Khan received an ornate letter signed by Marco Polo: "In Madrid, City of Lost Things, no item remains where it was set. If one drops his key in the dirt, he may never re-enter his home, and, even if he manages to stoop and recover the key, he may rise to find a tulip garden where his house once stood. In complementary fashion, things lost by others are forever turning up: A pocket watch on a coffee table. A fond memory in your recollection. I even know of a prince who turned up in a prison cell. When he appealed to the guards for his release, he failed to find the crown on his head, and when he was asked his name, he searched his thoughts, but could not find it. Indeed, the only hope now for the release of this prince of Spain is for you to send back 300 ducats for his release. Of course, he will reward you handsomely once he is out. Yours truly, Marco." Kublai Khan cocked an eyebrow and declared before his court, "Hey, everyone: Looks like we're about to get ripped off by the guy who traded gold for paper!" The court erupted in booming laughter. — Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities 2: This Time It's Visible.
  • stared
  • artrythall
    I can't imagine a worse thing happening to a better book.
  • 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…
  • Garlef
    It's one of my favorite books - and I think it deserves better; it's a conceptually very dense text and just slapping together a few 3D models misses the pointit's also not very astonishing that the current models are able to create this - it looks exactly as expectedand I actually think getting an interesting AI generated rendition of the text from a single prompt is a worthwhile endeavormaybe even a good replacement for the pelicans: it would test if a model can engage with a text beyond the surface levelbut this ain't it
  • 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.
  • sandbx
    Latent space is amazing isn’t it
  • imeanwhatdoikno
    Very cool, thanks for posting!And shame on all the people shitting on it because AI made it. If you valued art for art's sake, you wouldn't be so bothered when somebody makes something art-adjacent using some technique you don't approve of. It in no way detracts from the kind of art you admire. Don't be type who just has to let others know that you find something they like to be beneath you.
  • shieldagent
    Six hours of continuous runtime is the underrated part here. Most one-shot demos fall apart well before that, so this doubles as an endurance benchmark.
  • anon
    undefined
  • sreekanth850
    Does this bring any happiness? for me, No. effort need a purpose.
  • 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.
  • cwmoore
    While reading the book years ago, I did not visualize Isidora as a city with 9 houses, like a children’s book, or a little video game level intro, but so unlike Kublai Khan or Italo Calvino.
  • keyle
    On the down side, $84 spent on a slot machine might have actually yielded some benefits.
  • 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.
  • narfman0
    wow that's awesome! super cool :), fyi so inspiring that I did something similar for d&d forgotten realms, including a timeline: https://narfman0.github.io/realms-atlas/ fable drove it, opus agents did the work, took 30-45 minutes. (intend on extending to planescape, elaborating on significant historical events, and some text to speech narrating cool events)rock on
  • 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.
  • 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
  • allturtles
    I just have zero interest in looking at any of these "AI did a thing for me." posts.
  • konart
    Cecilia looks like an average residential area in Russia.
  • glinkot
    The creation really is amazing. I harnet heard of the book but got a long way through it!
  • mcphage
    What is this for? It doesn't deepen the understanding of the book. The illustrations aren't attractive on their own. They're not a very good representation of the descriptions in the book.
  • getpokedagain
    Doesn't work right on my phone.Vanadium (chrome)https://imgur.com/a/nGLyJf6
  • cpan22
    this is amazing, wonder how much better it's going to get in a year from now
  • 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.
  • pama
    Loads nothing on iphone lockdown mode fwiw.
  • jordemort
    I ran cat /dev/urandom for six hours but I didn't need to write a blog post about it
  • amelius
    If you're going to spend tokens on 3D stuff, then please build me a better FreeCAD first.
  • frereubu
    Thanks, I hate it. I imagine Calvino turning in his grave at such an abdication of human imagination.
  • diimdeep
    "Attention whore" used to mean someone who makes garbage to get attention. Now it's a machine that uses attention to make garbage.
  • gexaha
    Well it still has the trademark "colored left-side of the boxes" ai slop, but otherwise looks (and sounds!) very impressive.
  • gexaha
    Well it still has the trademark "colored left-side of the boxes" ai slop, but otherwise looks very impressive
  • 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 :).
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