My friends Dan Wexler and Gilles Dezeustre have just released a new app for your iPhone/iPad. It’s called Glaze. It’s a painterly rendering filter for your photos, and it’s really cool. It’s based on the traditional brushstroke-based model pioneered by folks like Paul Haeberli, Pete Litwinowicz and Aaron Hertzmann, but it adds some neat new twists: face detection to guarantee that eyes and other important features come out with the right amount of detail; a genetic algorithm for mutating and doing artificial selection on painting styles; and a really slick iOS interface that makes all of the above completely effortless and transparent. It also runs blazingly fast, considering all the work that must be going on under the hood. They’ll be giving a talk about the details at SIGGRAPH next week. (Here’s an abstract of their talk… wish I could go!)
What I find the app does best, so far, is to turn my garbage photos into beautiful art. This, for example, is a picture my thumb took by accident as I was putting away my phone. The original photo was blurry, out of focus, and weirdly composed. But the painting’s handmade feeling makes your eye linger on the details, and the results are just lovely. (Everyone’s Instagram is about to get a lot prettier!)
If you look closely at my friend Drew Olbrich, you might notice something strange about him. He doesn’t like to talk about it, but: the part of Drew you can see is just an infinitesimal slice of a much higher-dimensional being.
To give the rest of us a sense of what it’s like to be him, Drew’s written a nifty little app (for your iPhone or iPad) called The Fourth Dimension. Give it a spin, and see if it doesn’t thicken your mind up just a little bit.
Eric Rodenbeck just pointed me to this gorgeous little game for the iPhone: Drop7. It combines the best elements of Tetris and Sudoku, but somehow transcends them both. While most games start out interesting and then plateau, this one actually gets better with time. It tempts you to come up with ever-more-creative ways to set up the domino-like chain reactions that yield the highest scores. The design is also solidly appealing (hey, with two nice weights of Helvetica, how can you go wrong!) And is it addictive? Ohhhh man, is it ever. The first time I played it, I was on a hard-seated chair. I don’t know how long I was sitting there, but when I tried to stand up, I couldn’t feel my toes. Both of my legs had gone to sleep. It’s that addictive.
My only critique is that every single number is the wrong color. Consult a synesthete next time, ok guys? :-)
Cassidy Curtis's splendid display of colorful things.
