Skywalker Last Supper Painting Made With 69,550 Star Wars Frames

You HAVE to check this out. Taken from GizModo

This is what you get when you capture 69,550 full resolution frames from the six Star Wars movies and combine them with a version of DaVinci’s Last Supper on a PC with mosaic-making software and a custom matlab-based algorithm. The 262-megapixel mosaic (24,168 x 10,864 pixels) took two weeks to complete, including 30 hours of computing power and manual retouching for the final version. Avinash Arora, the guy who did it, tells us about the process.

galleryPost(“starwarssupper”, 3, “Star Wars Last Supper”);

Star Wars Last Supper

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Jesús Díaz: What materials did you use for creating this huge thing?
Avinash Arora: The 69,550-image collection I made is from all the movies. Originally I extracted EVERY image using vlc’s image output plug-in from Episode IV, and used a photoshop programmed command to delete every 19 frames, and save the 20th. Only after that did I discover AndreaMosaic could do that for me, which saved me a ton of time in the other five movies. As the base, I used Eric Deschamps’ Star Wars Last Supper painting done for Giant Magazine.

JD: What kind of computer did you use to do this?
AA: An Asus M2N SLI motherboard with AMD 5400+ X2, eVGA nVidia Geforce 8800GTS 640MB, and 2GB DDR2 Corsair XMS memory.

JD: What about the software?
AA: The original software I used is AndreaMosaic, but I found that the algorithm wasn’t really producing the results I wanted. I ended up tinkering with the settings and producing dozens of sample mosaics to view, and I did some research and found out how it worked.

JD: Did you get what wanted at the end? What did you do to improve the quality?
AA: I created my own slightly modified algorithm to include pathlines of the strongest “importance” (or rather color distinction, so I could find pictures that followed the image’s contours for every detail) I got more satisfying results. I kept tinkering with this one and made six full-size mosaics, until I finally settled on the last one…

JD: And that was that?
AA: No, I went to work on it by hand after that. I replaced at least a thousand images by hand that looked like they were out of place (my programming isn’t perfect), and did some color corrections on others. The entire thing was done when I took sections and pieces from the mosaics I made with AndreaMosaic, my own matlab-based algorithm, and the original image I drew inspiration from, and put it all together in Photoshop (I also discovered that .psd files have a maximum size of 2GB, but luckily .raw files do not.)

JD: How long did it take you, then?
AA: Each movie’s image extraction process took about an hour, that was the easy part. Each sample mosaic I made for testing took about 90 minutes. Each full mosaic I made took about 6-8 hours. Once I had the final mosaic and went to work, I’d say I put about 25-30 hours of work into touching up by hand.

The process (not including extracting the images from the movies) took me about two weeks from the time I made the first full mosaic, about a dozen samples, second full mosaic, dozen samples, etc.
During the two weeks I missed all but about two classes, and the day I finished I took an exam for a class I forgot I had…

JD: Geezuss…
AA: Don’t worry, I still did well. 🙂

JD: How big is the thing?
AA: Each image was about 640×272, but when placed into the mosaic they were shrunken down to 120 pixel wide. Each image is a full-quality jpeg, and they’re cut up into folders (because my computer doesn’t take too kindly to one folder with 69,550 files in it).

The final resolution of the image 24,168 x 10,864 pixels… 262 megapixels. Unfortunately I couldn’t print it at the epic level I wanted to, which would have been a 5×11′ composite, not a 3×6′, and that would have been a 712-megapixel image. The guy who prints them says his computer is incapable of opening an image that large (which flattened would have been about 3GB… and uncompressed almost 40GB.) [Avinator]

[How To] Access Your Bookmarks Online Anywhere!

Let’s face it, over the course of days, weeks, months, and even years you have collected a sweet collection of bookmarks in your web browser.  Don’t you wish you could access them anytime, anywhere, any how? Well, yes you can!

I use a site called Blinklist.  I understand there are other online bookmarking hosting sites, but I will focus on this one today.  This is a nice site.  All you need to do is go to http://www.blinklist.com and make an account there.  Once you are logged in, you can export your bookmarks from your web browser, and upload them to the website and thats it.

Next time you are at a different computer, just log into the website and all your bookmarks are there.  You can even import the bookmarks into your browser too if you wanted to.  Now the nice part of the website is you can tag your bookmarks, so that people can find them, as well as helping you find other people’s bookmarks.  Very cool indeed.

Touchpad for iPhone!

Touchpad for your iPhone or iPod Touch acts as a wireless touch pad for your pc! You can control the mouse on your pc through the iPhone: move the mouse around, click, double-click, and even drag (double click but keep it pressed and then move it around). Vertical scrolling is even possible, by clicking and dragging on the right edge of the iPhone screen.

You can use it to control videos, show pictures, advance slides in a presentations — whatever a regular touchpad can do.

Installation instructions:

1. You need a jailbroken iPhone/iPod Touch with Installer.app on it. Here are some great instructions on how to do this.
2. Start Installer.app, and go to Sources. Click “Edit”, and then Add this repository: http://cnp.qlnk.net/
3. After the refresh, install Touchpad from the Utilities category.
4. Install VNC on the machine you want to control. I recommend TightVNC for Windows and Linux. Mac users should follow these detailed instructions (thanks, Archetype!).

Taken from http://touchpadiphone.blogspot.com/

TGI Friday! #2

Welcome back to TGI Friday! While we look forward to what the weekend has in stock for us, I will look back at what happened this week in the world of technology!

As you all no doubt know, the Macbook Air was released earlier on this week. Yet again Apple have gone for the size factor and made an extremely small product. One of the main selling points is that it can fit inside an A4 envelope. That’s pretty impressive for a laptop, especially one that has (nearly) all the power of a normal sized laptop, one which already boasts amazing specs.

This does come at a cost though, as the Macbook comes without a CD/DVD drive. The solution is an external drive AND being able to load stuff wirelessly from another computer. For some this may be enough, for others though, along with the price tag of $1500+ (depending on additional features), this may be too big of a letdown.

Plus, I’m sure we’re all getting bored of Apple’s up-themselves approach to things… Even a MacFan such as myself.

Next up, the new Super Smash Bros has been delayed for a while yet till March 9th in North America. Still, looks like a hell of a lot of fun when it does eventually arrive. Check out their website for daily updates.

That’s all for today, so I leave you with the now infamous Corey Delaney interview. If you’re clueless, you’ll soon be filled in. Enjoy!

TGI Friday! #1

It’s possibly the greatest moment of the week when you get home after work or school, sit down and say ‘Thank God it’s Friday!’ For someone who lives as much for the weekend as myself, I know that Friday night is one of the most looked forward to points of my week. To show you just how much I love Fridays, here’s a picture I made a while back:

However, as much as it allows us to look forward to all the fun the weekend will bring, it is also a moment where we can look back on what the week has given us, and therein lies the point of these weekly posts. Every Friday from now on, I will endeavour to summarise as best I can what has happened in the Underground world of technology and perhaps bring certain other things to your attention, whether they will shock you or amuse you.

Perhaps the biggest thing this week was the CES, which stands for Consumer Electronics Show. If you’re still confused, think of E3 but for general technology. This year’s show brought to our attention the world’s largest LCD screen and also the Optimus keyboard, which has finally come out of development hell to ship in 2 months (if it’s not delayed…) with a huge price tag of $1500! However, this particular keyboard is probably worth it, considering just how awesome it is.

For a little more on CES, check out this article.

Technically this didn’t happen this week and so is quite old news, but nonetheless for those who still haven’t heard, three Texans attempted to sue Microsoft over a weekend of Xbox Live outages for $5 million. Naturally, as we all know that the Internet is serious business, this has been the source of much debate and argument. Should Microsoft face the price for a faulty service? Should these people just shut up and get a life? Read more here.

And news just in, Darth Vader and Yoda have been confirmed for Soul Calibur IV, for the PS3 and the Xbox 360 respectively! This is no hoax my friends, and is certainly a very interesting decision for a series that has already seen some major cross-overs in the form of Link, Spawn and Heihachi. See the trailer below!

And so with that, I’m off. So far you are being left with a hot picture every week, and so I will try and leave you with a humourous video every week. Seeing as CES was the main event this week, I leave you with this video of the guys at Gizmodo wreaking havoc with the monitors at CES. Enjoy!