- What am I looking at?
- The results of a search for Wally around the world, using unsecured cameras and AI: short clips in which someone in a red-and-white striped shirt walks through the frame. Scroll to see the next one. The search is still going on, so the list keeps growing.
- How does it find him?
- Software takes a frame from each of the 450+ unsecured cameras, every few seconds where a lot is moving and less often where nothing is. Every frame is shown to a vision model with one question: is there a person in a red-and-white striped shirt? When it says yes, the seconds around that frame are saved as a clip. Dries checks every match for false positives before anything is published.
- Which AI model is it?
- Qwen3-VL, an openly released vision-language model from Alibaba's Qwen team, in its version with about 30 billion parameters (qwen3-vl:30b-a3b). It is not a Wally detector. It is a general model: it is given a picture and a question in plain words, and it writes an answer. Here it gets one camera frame and a description of who to look for: red-and-white striped shirt, bobble hat, round glasses. It replies with three things: found or not, how sure it is, and one sentence about what it sees. The percentage shown with every result is that “how sure”.
- Where does the model run?
- Locally, with Ollama, on the graphics cards listed under GPU Server Stats. The frames are not sent to a cloud AI service. One frame takes it a second or two, around the clock. It also makes mistakes, which is why Dries checks every match for false positives before it appears here.
- Is this live?
- The search is: it runs around the clock and is still going on, and the numbers under GPU Server Stats are the machine's own readings from a few seconds ago. The clips are its results. They appear after Dries has checked them for false positives, so they arrive with a delay.
- Why is everything blurred?
- Privacy. The only thing meant to be seen is the red-and-white shirt. Everything and everyone else is blurred and turned black-and-white before a clip leaves the machine.
- I have a red-and-white striped shirt. If I wear it, will I be on this site?
- The chances are very low, but maybe. You would have to walk past one of the 450+ cameras, at a moment a frame is taken, close enough for the model to notice the stripes, and then Dries still has to pick your clip.
- Where are the cameras?
- All over the world. Only the country is shown. The exact place and the camera itself are never published.
- Is this connected to the books?
- No. Wally Finder is an independent artwork. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, endorsed by or otherwise connected to the “Where's Wally?” / “Where's Waldo?” books, their creator, their publishers or the owners of those trademarks. All names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to describe what the work is looking for.
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