While searching for a project for my independent study, Mike suggested to me that I do a mosaic of something. A mosaic requires several hundred source photos, so I planned to go to loads of sports games this spring and do one in the shape of the school’s mascot, the Bobcat. But then I realized that Robotics already had several hundred photos for me to use.
We had about two hundred photos from previous years, which combined with about two hundred more photos from this year. It’s amazing how many more photos you get when lots of people have their own digital cameras. I had been looking for mosaic software online, and went through several alternatives before finding AndreaMosaic. The really nice thing about AndreaMosaic was that it would tint each image a little bit towards what it was supposed to be, so images look like they fit better than they really do.
AndreaMosaic also let me pull frames from the video of our competitions, so that gave me about five thousand additional photos to use as filler. They’re mostly visible in the background. It took some fiddling with the source image of the bobcat I used to get everything to fill in better and to use less filler. After stealing photos from everyone’s digital camera from Philly, I had about six hundred source images to work with.
The final mosaic is about 600 images large, and at full resolution, ~7400px x 7300px. We printed it on a big printer in the architecture room, so it's about two feet square. One copy went up in the robot display case (it was a pain to mount to poster board, let me tell you), and the other copy will be stuck in a poster frame and hung in my room. The funnest part of the mosaic is going through and looking at all the people in the photos. Everyone at Robot was pointing out all the people in the photos from previous years who I don’t know.
A larger (but still not full-size) view of the mosaic is here and a close up (but still not full-resolution) view of one segment is here.
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