Nauseate yourself and others with YouTube’s hidden "warp" feature

Posted by Techno Admin

March 3, 2008

Put this in the category of neat looking but potentially headache-inducing. It’s a recently-introduced YouTube feature that lets you view videos in a floating array of thumbnails. Users of Digg’s swarm visualization will feel right at home, as both share a slightly similar interface (albeit Digg’s is a little more useful).

Access the ‘warp’ view by first clicking the full screen (left) then the triangle-like button in the player (right).

(Credit: CNET Networks)

To access the warp mode just click on the full screen button in any YouTube video (the one on the far right) and then move all the way over to the left to the strange triangle-looking button. Clicking it zooms the video out into a black space with tiny round video thumbnails. Holding your mouse over any of them will pull up other similar videos–a process you can continue limitlessly, or until you hit a dead end (marked with a red border). If you’ve ever used Quintura’s video search, it works the same way.

One thing to note is that this feature only works from videos watched on YouTube, and not embedded clips. It also doesn’t seem to work yet with any videos that have YouTube’s overlay ads in them.

Update: Gallery of warp videos here.

Make connections and watch videos in the same place. If you start venturing too far off course, YouTube creates a line for you to figure out where your exploration started.