Just wasted about 20 minutes of my life playing with this. I would really like to know the technology behind. Is there some sort of ML going on, or is this human trained? Either way, very entertaining and scary accurate.
Something as low tech as having a predefined map of {location : picture} would do it. Break up the screen into a grid of NxN quadrants, like 20x20. Then just find 400 pictures with a finger near each quadrant. Translate cursor to a quadrant x,y; look up picture. Done.
Good "point" -- the right question posted to mturk/crowdflower/etc. could have knocked out that json file for relatively minimum time/cost. Oh, the things we humans engage in.
That's what I assumed. If I just moved my mouse a couple pixels I usually got the same pointing image back. I think they just divided it up into regions and then load the appropriate image for each region.
However, if that's all they're doing, it seems odd that it takes so long to load... Maybe some of that's just a built-in delay to keep from constantly cycling images from someone who's bumping the mouse.
The delay might be to build up suspense. The two–three seconds it spent loading I spent thinking "how could something that's essentially xeyes possibly take this long… ohhh haha very cute"
