non-obvious Patent

Firstly, looking back is not a fair way to evaluate how obvious something is.  Regardless, there are at least two ways to think of how obvious it could have been.  One, how big of a jump was it to get to from where we were and two, how many people would see the need for the new software?  Based on the tools that we have been given that can tile and detect color there is not a very large jump to put the technology together especially since people made regular mosaics before photomosaics.  There is a small jump between making a mosaic and making it with all photos and another small jump from making a photomosaic to deciding to make it an automated process (we like to make machines that can "do" things for us).  Those two jumps make the software seem easy to look for.  Joseph Francis made a photomosaic without the software and it seems to me that the next step should have been obvious.

Plan

 I'm going to insert some of these cartoon animals into a picture of me.  Instead of making a green screen for them I am going to atempt to replace the white wih my background which may or may not work  exacty the way I want it to because they have white eyes. My goal is to have the picture look like I'm reading to or playing with the animals.  First I need to crop my pictures down to specific animals that I can easily put on the background using the crop function. I'm gone to modify the swapbg so that I can use the smaller pictures and so that I can change the picture without a green background.     

I found out that the clips actually have a gray background which should make it easier to isolate the animals.

Standing on Water!!!

Tiles (sort of)

I like this effect.  It is fun to have a floating tree on the upper left. It reminds me that it is a good thing for trees to be a-symmetrical because they can hold peoples interest longer.I could add color to the tiles but I think the contrast in this picture is neat.

I need to modify tile so that it doesn't have to be one picture.  It would make this a lot easier. :)

Random

some expirements with color and blending....(watch her eyes)

Response to Carr

Although it would be like having a “magic” book, I don’t think that it is a good idea to mess with books as we do other digital media. I like to be able to read books as the author intended them, even if they don’t write in the style that I most enjoy. I think the ability to change the contents of a book based on analysis of reader reaction will cause the books to end up reading the same way. I think they would lose originality even more so than today where story plots are passed around frequently. On the upside though, I would never have to buy another book if enough authors decided to keep tweaking their books (of course they may start losing money over that). I think that textbooks would be too easy to abuse. People could erase importantevents if they wanted to or they could easily switch a book back and forth so that parents wouldn’t really know what their children were learning. It could become hard to trust books in the same way that we can’t always trust pictures today. I think that it is important to keep our books from becoming unstable. It would become a big problem if our primary sources became unreliable.

Project

As of yet I have not had an inspired moment about the centerpiece for the project.  I think I may use some of my own pictures but I need to go home to retrieve them.  I like to play with color especially when it stands out and may do something with that.  I have some pictures of places around Danville that I could use.  It might be intriguing to try to make my own photo mosaic using jython.  Then again that would be quite challenging and wouldn't necessarily use very many of the tools that we have. I'm just not sure at the moment.