Unfavorable-Semicircle-Wiki

LOCK

Overview

♐LOCK is a video posted to the original UFSC YouTube channel on July 18, 2015. Analysis of the video lead to the creation of the first composite image.

Description of video

♐LOCK is mostly black with colors occasionally flashing and revealing a single black pixel within each frame.

Audio

At the start of the video, the Unknown Voice spells out the word “LOCK”. The audio is in stereo with many strange sounds, heard separately in the left and right channels.

Unusually, this is the only known UFSC video at a 48K sample rate (as opposed to 44.1K)

Morse code

On January 2022, Discord user Princeton King has made the following claim:

Guys the audio in lock its reads fear in Morse code

••-• • •- •-•

play the video at 0.25x

Then you can see the flashes and hear the sound how they line up It’s easier to line them up

Direct-current offset

Dom: It seems like the DC offset of LOCK’s left channel is correlated with the amplitude of the signal. Here’s a few snippets from the section with the hearthstone composite:

When there is no signal (in the blank space near the left and right side of the image), the waveform is centered around 0, or slightly higher. As the signal comes in, the DC offset increases and the whole waveform gets lower. Seems like it has some inertia to it, and it eventually reaches a steady position if the signal is constant in amplitude, as it is in the first image.

Also worth noting the waveform for basically the entire track looks like this. Google calls it a “half-wave rectified sine”. Even the voice has this waveform

Mike & Rich: Yeah thats basically a unipolar sine wave, a simpler name for it

Red-shift

Red-shifting is a concept in physics, especially important to the field of astronomy, when it comes to measuring the distance and speed of deep-space objects or radiation. The Oxford dictionary defines it as:

The displacement of spectral lines toward longer wavelengths (the red end of the spectrum) in radiation from distant galaxies and celestial objects.

The DC offset here may have a similar effect. It has been observed that ♐LOCK’s Hearthstone icon seems to be a copy of the original image’s red channel (rather than the entire red-green-blue image). Since one of UFSC’s themes is astrology (or astronomy), it is possible that this is a delberate technical-aesthetical choice.

GSM

On November 2024, Discord user N25_CT13 wrote:

Lock’s right audio channel is most likely raw data read as GSM 6.10 “format” which is present in Audacity and the left channel’s DC offset could have been removed due to the GSM encoding removing DC offset for some reason (could be due to compression).

A comparison of raw-data encoded as GSM (provided by N25_CT13) and LOCK’s audio:

The next month: GSM-like audio was also discovered in 40 videos in the original unnamed series.

Significance

Along with ♐DELOCK, due to its name it has long been suspected that this video is of special significance in deciphering any concealed messages that other videos might contain.

Frame composite discovery

On April 20, 2016, Reddit user tomasf.se discovered that when each individual frame of the video is combined into an image with a width of 197 pixels, a picture appears. The subject of this image was subject to intense debate over several years (see below). In June 2022, @unfavorablesem posted a new version of the composite image alongside a link to the wikipedia article on the Voyager Golden Record.

Composite images

Regular Size: http://tomasf.se/projects/semi/LOCK_composite.png
Huge Size: http://tomasf.se/projects/semi/LOCK_composite_huge.png

(alternative ♐LOCK composite with width of 197.36 pixels that does not need to be shifted to the left like the previous one (which may be skewed)

@unfavorablesem version posted to twitter

(version posted to twitter by @unfavorablesem)

3D Composite

The later discovery of 3D Composited lead to retrospective analysis of earlier videos, but there is nothing particularly “interesting” in this video’s 3D composite.

“black dots” and “bars”

Many frames in ♐LOCK contain a single black pixel at different locations in the 50 x 50 image. (The small image size means that there is an 8 x 8 compression artifact around the dot.) Some frame also have a “bar” across the bottom. Discord user Dom has noted “some frames have a dot, some have a bar, and some have both. Darker frames tend to have neither.”

An enlarged frame from LOCK (original 50x50). Note the 8x8 artifact and the 2x50 bar.

This image has been adjusted the contrast for visibility (normally the artifacts are much more subtle, especially the bar).

Image by Discord user Dom.

It has long been debated as to whether the the positions of the dots are random or represent meaningful data.

Theories and possible explanations

Observations on the ♐LOCK image

Many users have proposed that the image decoded from the video contains various things. Possibilities mentioned by users include:

A Watch
A Skull
Text reading “MGM 1900” (also seen as MGK or MCM)
Some kind of coin
Mushroom cloud from an atomic explosion
Hurricane radar image
A Galaxy or dark nebula
Saturn’s hexagon
An ultrasound image
A hand holding a pokeball
A deformed pokeball
A grey hair
A lock
A look-alike of MC Escher’s “Hand With Reflecting Sphere”

Other possible theories

a compilation of individual pixels from other UFSC videos
an SSTV broadcast image
a result of a computer program attempting to create music
speaker feedback sounds

Contemporaneous Reddit threads

arranged roughly in chronological order