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"Universal Jigsaw Puzzle" Hits Stores In Japan

Posted by timothy on from the fools-the-eye dept.

Riktov writes "I came across this at a Tokyo toy store last week, and it's one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. Jigazo Puzzle is a jigsaw puzzle, but you can make anything with it. It has just 300 pieces which are all just varying shades of a single color, though a few have gradations across the piece; i.e., each piece is a generic pixel. Out of the box, you can make Mona Lisa, JFK, etc, arranging it according to symbols printed on the reverse side. But here's the amazing thing: take a photo (for example, of yourself) with a cell-phone, e-mail it to the company, and they will send you back a pattern that will recreate that photo. This article is in Japanese, but as they say, a few pictures are worth a million words. And 300 pixels are worth an infinite number of pictures."

4 of 241 comments (clear)

  1. JPEG by Quietust · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Seems remarkably similar to how JPEG compression works. Not surprisingly, the resulting pictures look a lot like overcompressed JPEGs.

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  2. Not quite. by girlintraining · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It appears to be monochromatic and it also used nearest-approximation algorithms... Which means that the extra pieces are inserted as "random noise" once the general shapes are mapped out. Clever, but... low resolution.

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    1. Re:Not quite. by Kazoo+the+Clown · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It essentially has a fixed histogram. I wonder what you'd get back from them if you sent them an image specifically designed to be hard to fit into that histogram...

  3. Re:puzzle? by shentino · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'd swear that it almost looks like a tool to teach someone about basic JPEG encoding.