jun
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ArtPixelator Announcement
The next program I'm releasing was inspired by a video by the band Fujiya & Miyagi. Titled Ankle Injuries, it can be seen right here.
That got me to wondering, "How would I do a conversion of a picture into something like those dice?" Which got me to further wondering, "What else could I turn a picture into?" Which led to yet deeper wondering along the lines of, "What kind of a tool could I develop that would convert art of one style into a new style?"
ArtPixelator will be the realization of these ideas. A proof of concept was thrown together in a day, the results of which may be seen below. That was just Applescript and Photoshop CS3, but my inner voice says, "Use Cocoa and Quartz, it'll be awesomely fast 'n stuff! Also, you should totally become a rock star!"
I think I'll just do the Cocoa app, but Quartz currently has a steep learning curve.
Any ideas for this program that I might not have thought about? Drop me a line!
It's a one trick pony, but what a trick! Consider your photo album and think about the kinds of effects the average person has available to her/him to "art up" those photos. Apply a filter, sharpen, blur, make it "look like charcoal pencil", and so on.
These effects are getting long in the tooth. Imagine now a computer assisted art generation device that lets you take a photo of, say, Mt. Fuji and realize it as if it were made of Lego blocks. Or, a painting of a bowl of fruit, realized as if it were made from other pieces of fruit. Or a picture of a loved one, realized as if it you had stacked a bunch of dice together to reform the image.
It's akin to those posters that show a movie studio icon made out of still shots from all of that studio's movies. However ArtPixelator is a bit more low-tech, low-resolution and layman-accessible than that. It's more about maintaining the retro-charm of a low-resolution image, but rendering it with high-resolution artwork. In essence, ArtPixelator will create an original composite mosaic from high-resolution artwork you supply, based on a source image you specify. Take photos of interesting tilework, then have ArtPixelator generate a new piece of original art using the tile photos as substitues for the pixels in the source image. See the Mona Lisa rendered as a bathroom tile mosaic!
Of course, if ArtPixelator can do one image, what's to stop it from doing every image in a movie file? Such is the direction I wish this project to pursue.
