[geran]

Anybody remember that cute little program kpt goo for os 8/9 ...

I have tried to find any information how that app worked, anybody knows.

I found this little piece of information and that only made me more curious

http://www.zounds.net/marc/whatgoo.html

Kai's Power Goo is a stand alone program used to melt and patch pictures. MetaTools calls it liquid image funware. After loading up a picture into the Goo Room, you can use the brushes to stretch, bend, warp, squeeze, and spin the image into weird and wild 'gooed' images. The Fusion Room lets you take pieces from seperate pictures and paste them together smoothly and seamlessly.

The graphics editing power of Goo is incredible. Although limited in scope, the brushes in Goo will let you do things just not possible before. The mathematical little gears inside Goo are revolutionary: Goo does not use pixels while you are editing, it simply changes the flow of the mathematical overlay that is affecting the image. This allows you to do endless amounts of stretching and enlarging without pixelating the image. You can also link together changes you have made to an image to make an animation, or Goovie. Because this is also done only with the math, you can change the speed at which it is animated, and goo will automaticaly interpolate the frames needed to run it.

Kai's Power Goo is a stand alone product from Metatools. This is thier first mass market product, and although powerful, is intended to be entertainment ware. People never fail to have a strong response to the images you can make int Goo. From sureal to hillarious to down right creepy, gooed pictures catch the eye.

Can somebody please point me to some articles, books or websites were this is discussed.

[Rickster]

I'm no good for a deep technical explanation, but I may be able to give a bit of insight:

Their claim of "not using pixels" is a little misleading... it all comes back to pixels at some point. What they're trying to get at is that what you're doing is not so much painting as it is warping the coordinate space the original pixels come from. As you play with their "brushes", you're essentially building a complicated function that says "the pixel at (x,y) should move to (x', y')"... except instead of translating or flipping every (x,y) by the same amount, the effects of this function vary with x and y.

You can play with this kind of math using products like Pacific Tech's Graphing Calculator (see here) or Wolfram's Mathematica, among others. Googling "nonlinear coordinate transformation" or similar might help you find a good discussion of the subject.

Also, since Kai's Power GOO is pretty ancient, you can find much the same features (sans acid-trippy UI) in Photoshop 7 and newer (under Filter > Liquify).