Terrible, nightmarish things happen…that’s what.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, DeepDream is a new visualization tool created by Google engineers to study how neural networks carry out visualization tasks. It also creates very wild, vivid images (the end result of DeepDream processing would probably not seem out of place in a movie like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)…or, rather, distortions of images; running DeepDream on images has become something of a thing on the Internet.

So, I decided to see what DeepDream did to a still from the Ultima 6 intro. The results are…well…there’s a bird, see?

The IPython code for DeepDream can be found here if you want to set it up for yourself. There’s also a reworking of the code for use on videos, which I might have to try on e.g. the Ultima 9 intro at some point. I used DreamDeeply.com to make the image above (it takes a while; you submit the image, and they email it to you some number of hours later…once it has worked its way through the processing queue), though if I keep working on this I’ll probably run the code locally instead.