Above is an example of how RealMosaic was used to make a rendition of a picasso self portrait out of bottlecaps.
RealMosaic was one of my first forays into image processing and visual re-appropriation. RealMosaic takes information (visual and numerical) about a set of similarly sized objects and provides instructions for how to arrange them to resemble any image that you specify.
The first run was with bottle caps, due to a huge stash provided by my co conspirators, but I hope to do it with something like dirty socks in the future. It has three parts: ~ algorithm that isolates objects placed on white paper, interface for a user to enter statistics about their set of objects and desired output image, and an algorithm that determines an optimal placement of the objects based on all that data.
Thanks to Rodney Monheit, Nathan Halow, and Melanie Frank who helped create the first physical piece.