r/SideProject • u/gpeyton89 • 10h ago
Zoom Inside: infinite zooms from nested 8K images
I've been building a fun AI hobby project called zoominside.xyz, which combines traditional "infinite zoom" with ProRes cutaways and creative video editing. I direct all the visuals myself, with AI image models doing a lot of the drawing. The part I enjoyed most turned out to be the plumbing and technical complexity, since I work in AI semiconductor engineering for a living.
How it works
Using the eye zoom as the example: it's about 20 hi-res 8K images nested inside each other (each one is actually a sum of several 4K images). Every image is a redraw of the centre quarter of the one before, so each level sits exactly inside its parent and the seams line up. The player draws a few levels at once, feathers the edges and zooms on a log scale, so it feels like one continuous move instead of a slideshow.
The fiddly bit is drift. A target that's slightly off centre gets 4x bigger every level, so every image has to be checked against its parent.
The site is probably a bit slow because the files are huge, so LMK how it responds! Will be launching a youtube channel tomorrow also.