So I randomly came across a video on youtube where a person made an image inside of static by having some static stay the same from frame-to-frame. It was really trippy and I suddenly got an idea – I could do the same thing, but with a real image. It’s hard to describe, but if you watch the above video (done by me), you’ll see what I’m talking about.

I coded the whole thing up this past weekend (available on github here: Image Quilter). The code is really rough, but I knew if I didn’t finish it fast, it would be something that just fell to the wayside. In fact, sitting here now the whole thing seems a little silly, but it’s kind of a neat illusion. In place of static, I used texture generated from a texture synthesis algorithm. It’s from a paper I read 20 years ago. I came across it in one of my college classes.

Amusingly I wound up having to implement Dijstra’s algorithm to get it working. I remember learning about that in school – and in the past 20 years I’ve never had to use it. But it was cool to finally break it out for something.

Also, I don’t think I’ve ever recorded a voice over before, so sorry if I sound wooden. I think everyone thinks their voice sounds weird and I wasn’t totally happy with it, but it was either my real voice or text on the screen, and I’m not a fan of the latter type of video.

Approved comments

In other news, I hadn’t checked the spam filter for this blog in a long time and there were a lot of real comments caught in it for some reason. I went in and approved all of the non-spam ones that I saw. Sorry if you had a comment that didn’t displayed until now. If you still don’t see your comment just shoot me an email (see the contact page).