Murray Woodman

I had spent a small amount of time with an object called ASPImage and had programmed a system which could store a library of small images and then decompose a source image into the smaller images. This was something I had wanted to do for a long time and I was very chuffed with what I had done. I believed to to be quite innovative, however, a search on the internet deflated my excitement and ego. There were already a number of plug ins and standalone systems that did what I had programmed. Damn.

Problem

My previous idea was good but it had already been done. Not only had the problem been solved technically, there were also quite a few commercial operations who were doing the transforms for next to no cost. These included photo shops in the US and US websites.

The problem was to innovate around what had already been done and to distinguish my product from the run of the mill.

Solution

The solution I came to was to maintain the biggest strength of the image, the multitude of images, and to lose the biggest weakness, the highly pixelated nature of the image. All image composition software of this kind arranged the compositional images into a grid – resulting in a pixelated image when viewed up close. My solution was to take randomly positioned samples of different sizes of the original source image and then to match these with the library. Also, when the library image was to be placed it would be feathered – leading to a more organic image.

If things turn out – there should be no sharp edges, just bigger images in the background layers and smaller images towards the front. Not only do you have the “many images in one” metaphor, you also have the “many layers in one” metaphor. Hopefully the resulting image should look more like a “blob” of color which can be enjoyed on a more artistic, rather than industrial level. Some of the images will be obfuscated but this shouldn’t matter too much.

Inspiration

Technology has introduced new printing techniques which used randomly placed and sized dos of colour to give the illusion of a higher resolution than is apparent with regualrly placed dots on a dot screen.

I was looking at a closeup of a Billabong poster at the airport and saw that it had been printed using this technique and it got me thinking. Random is good.

Implementation

Some software – java perhaps. I need a good image class which allows me to load an image into ram and feather it before merging with output image.

Stengths and Weaknesses

There is a lot of competition out there, however, this approach is new as far as I can tell.

Business Model

I believe that a high end approach would be best. Ie. Take commissions, print the work out and see the resultant image for a lot of money. If the output is beautiful enough then the images should stand on their own.

Outcome

More research, code, is required. Definitely a goer.