HD Interaction

Pixel search algorithm

Continuing to exploit my recently found spare time, I thought it would be fun to see what happens if you scan a bitmap in search for the greatest color pixels. Turned out to be pretty cool! Even though you can probably do this a million times faster in Photoshop, I’m still pretty happy with the result. Check the images below. Check my flickr site for more details.

So, how does it work:

• Sort all the pixels by color. 0xFFFFFF first, 0×000000 last, this means that yellowish pixels will be searched first.
• Remove the first pixel from the sorted pixels, and find the neighboring pixel with the greatest value. Remove this pixel from the list.
• Continue until no neighbors are found.
• Repeat step one until no pixels are left.

It is a very slow algorithm, so I made this video of the process and increased the speed.

UPDATE: made it faster, sorting the pixels had a slow element to it. Now the algorithm is finished within several seconds.

Glow filter patterns

This afternoon I was in a designer furniture shop in Amsterdam. While I was there I spotted a carpet which was made up out of lines of fabric (check the image below).

This gave me the idea of doing something similar with code. It ended up being a pretty simple thing to do. You just need to start out with a basic shape, then you need to draw that shape onto a bitmap. The next step is to apply a glow filter with a specific color, and repeat this over and over again with different colors. You can try it out yourself over here. The result may end up something like this…

Varekai backstage

The Varekai backstage application is an Adobe AIR application to promote the Varekai show of Cirque du Soleil. The application shows exclusive video’s and photos behind the scenes of the show. Recently I added an upload feature to upload your own “training” photos and videos. Keep an eye out for updates. Download the application here.