Slashdot Mirror
Clouds, The Collaborative Photo Mosiac
jaric writes "Over at peffis.com users post their cell phone photos to a shared photo blog. The creator of the open source site now has invented what he calls Clouds. It is a combination of all the posted photos into one cloud, or mosaic. The result is quite fascinating. You can see the current cloud."
This site looks like a meltdown waiting to happen...
Current cloud temporary mirror. Be aware that this won't update hourly as the site one does...
Mirror: 5light.com/cloud.jpg
I also am missing the point here. Is this generated with some really cool function-based language? Is it being done on a beowulf cluster of Sony-Ericssons? I see about 30 photos slapped together with some alpha channels... ummm... GREAT! Now, I'm going to go read the white pages cover to cover, because it's more interesting.
Best read in good ol' Monaco 9 point.
/usr/X11R6/lib/xscreensaver/webcollage - comes with xscreensaver. Written in perl, easy enough to give it new methids to find photos.
Nick Waterman, Sr Tech Director, #include <stddisclaimer>
My God, it's full of crap!
That is, when it's not timing out from too many requests..
The point is that the cloud image isn't assembled by a person acting senselessly in Photoshop, but by an automated program that is most definitely acting senselessly each hour.
Cool, and it takes a bit of graphics processing to make it happen... but still kinda pointless.
It might be nice if the cloud had more pcitures in it. As it is, it's not much of a mosaic. According to Dictionary.com, a Mosaic is:
# A picture or decorative design made by setting small colored pieces, as of stone or tile, into a surface.
I don't think it's much of a mosaic, as it doesn't form a large picture. I just don't get it.
"I don't really care if they label me a Jesus Freak / There aint no disguising the truth!" - DC Talk
bye
Mark
My girlfriend participates in something a little more structured than this, but similar. Sito has a number of projects such as (descriptions taken from Sito) -
Hygrid: "This collaborative art project has been evolving since December 1995. The idea behind this project is to create a "hyperlinked grid of visually interlocked images". Each square on the grid is a small image created by a participating artist. Each square is adjacent to another artist's square in the structure, appearing on the top, right, bottom or left side."
Gridcosm: "Gridcosm is a collaborative art project in which artists from around the world contribute images to a compounding series of graphical squares."
Those are the two most active and interesting ones. For those that enjoy recursive acronyms, you'll definitely like Gridcosm (like a recursive acronym.. FOR YOUR MIND). Some of the levels can be outright beautiful, some are crappy.
The way it works is this: after having an account, you "reserve" a piece to work on. You have a set time limit to turn your piece in before somebody else gets it. As an example -- and since she reads Slashdot, she's gonna kill my ass -- you can also view individual pieces and jump from there.
The most interesting behavior I've seen, though, is that work breeds work -- when one or a few people decide to bounce in, the entire community picks up, contributing to an almost organic growth and decline of the various levels and sub-projects.
This cloud thing is just asking to end up where you get just enough opacity on a layer to recognize a boob, but it fades into a Peugot before the nipple!
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo