PhD student one-shots 3Blue1Brown-style paper animations with Opus 5.5 in one hour

hsu_byron · x · 2026-09-26

Stanford PhD student Brian Chao reports that Opus 5.5 made his old storyboard-render-tease loop for paper videos feel over-engineered.

• New workflow: throw paper PDFs at the model, ask for 3Blue1Brown-style animations, let it run for about an hour.
• Result: coherent animations that faithfully match the 3b1b style, plus unprompted visualizations and toy experiments illustrating core concepts — zero hand-holding, one shot.
• Showcased on his Foveated Diffusion project (gaze visualization, pipeline demo).
• The linked paper itself: non-uniform tokenization concentrates high-res tokens near the gaze region, giving 2× image and 4× video generation speedup with perceptually indistinguishable output.

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