At HackMTL, I learnt an important lesson: Make something which is very obvious and easy to explain. Coalesce was interesting but so esoteric that I don’t think anyone really followed what it is that it was actually doing. So a photo mosaic seemed like a good choice. Except a photo mosaic isn’t the most compelling thing ever; and so I made a video photo mosaic instead (:

And while I did come in 4th, again (: Leila decided to award me a prize for best use of the Piximilar API. Aww.

I used the iSight camera in my MacBook as a video source for both kinds of mosaic. For the first, simpler kind, you could click anywhere on the video, and the app would show a collection of images that matched that colour. If you clicked a second time, it would show you a collection of images that were half of each colour, and so on (up to 5 colours – at which point the oldest colour is dropped).

For the second kind, it was showing the video as a constantly updating photo mosaic. Having it show a tile for each individual colour that was present would have involved making an enormous number of requests to the colour search API; so instead, I made it so that it would round colours. At the default rendering level, it would round each of the RGB hex values to the nearest 64 – enough resolution to sortof see what’s going on, but a small enough colour set that precaching it isn’t tooo onerous.

But I also made it so you could adjust the colour accuracy! with more accurate colours, the photo mosaic is less complete; but as time goes by, its cache of images can expand to include all of the colours which are shown. I didn’t quite get to making an asynchronous image loader; so for each frame of video-mosaic rendered, it would load one more colour so that it wouldn’t stall too long on a single frame.

A demo, let me show you one:

HackOTT – Icarus from _hristine on Vimeo.

(Uhm. It looks like there’s something weird with Vimeo embedding which is making it show the video for Coalesce twice. If you’re looking at this on my homepage, and this seems confusing, click the link under the video..)