Wednesday, November 2, 2011

The Human side of Arduino

As I mentioned in previous postings I have been pretty busy keeping up with my life. Why? Usual suspects: work, family and hobbies. I am proud to announce though that I somehow (together with my wife) managed to gave it a shot to the making a business out of one of my hobbies.

Unfortunately the hobby I am talking about is not the one all the readers of this blog are aware of (Electronics) but building face photomosaics. What? yes Face photomosaics. And what are those, well keep reading to find out.

We recently started MosaicYourself an online based service that makes mosaics. You will say, but there are already services out there making mosaics. Yes but at MosaicYourself we make Face Photomosaics. That is mosaics where the tiles are faces.

Why faces? Well pretty easy, because faces are recognizable even if they are small, and based on our experience faces are small enough to be tiles of a mosaic but big enough to be something recognizable that gives it a personalized appearance.

Well cut the talk and let's get to the point. I thought that in order to somehow make a tribute to the Arduino  and takin advantage of the LinkedIn option of MosaicYourself, we generated the mosaic we call THE FACES OF ARDUINO.

This mosaic (see below) depicts the popular microcontroller as a base images and it features the faces from the people at the Arduino Playground group on LinkedIn as tiles.

The picture below does not show enough detail to appreciate the details of the tiles, follow this link to see the picture in the website with a mouse drag enabled zoom to see the details.


There are exactly 171 different faces and chances are that if you are a member of this group, you have a profile picture and our face detector likes it, you might be part of the picture!!

But that is not all, because in order to use the double effect of the mosaic (detail vs overall picture), at MosaicYourself we also offer zoomout videos like the one below, where we go from detail to full picture to have a better effect.

The zoom-out video example below is also a picture of the Arduino we used from Daniel Andrade's HD pictures from the Arduino. This particular mosaic contains 190 faces from the same group on LinkedIn, so if you did not find yourself in the last mosaic, you might in this one!! (See links below). See the mosaic with zoom tool here



So hopefully you like the concept and want MosaicYourself to use your picture library to extract faces and build a nice mosaic for you. Or maybe use the faces of your LinkedIn contacts to make the logo of your company.

If you are interested we make the business by selling the printouts (or file versions) of the mosaics, so you can purchase any of those two Arduino mosaics at our store, or directly from the links below
- Purchase the Faces of Arduino mosaic in a poster
- Purchase the Arduino Macro mosaic in a poster

If you are interested in the details of the Arduino mosaics follow these links
www.mosaicyourself.com/ArduinoFaces
www.mosaicyourself.com/ArduinoMacro

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