Show HN: A live-drawn portrait of the common face

vrangen.net

34 points·sloev··8 comments

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Author here.

A python program continously draws 22 different faces over each other.

All faces are aligned at the eyes.

The drawing particles have three different behaviors:

1. Move randomly

2. Move randomly with 45 degree angles

3. Move randomly but attracted to the firstborn particle and afraid of being near the average position of all particles.

Go to

https://vrangen.net/fuzzy/static/images/debug.jpg

for a picture of the particles in action

Sourcecode available at

http://github.com/sloev/face_experiments

Does the image move in real time or is that my imagination

It moves in real time. It is drawn continously by phthon software. Visit the mentioned https://vrangen.net/fuzzy/static/images/debug.jpg url for a snapshot of how the particle workers are currently moving around

The image on the site is refreshed every 5 seconds. Changes are minuscule it does 1000 pixel changes a minute currently. Particles move at 1 pixel speed with an angle based on their behavior

The ghostly quality of the particle drawing is really nice. I love how it gets the overlaid effect across but in a nicer way than simple transparency.

How are the particles attracted to the areas of the image that need to be darker?

They are unaware of the underlying image they draw. Each particle is associated a random picture to draw at birth and continous to draw until death. Draw means copy a pixel from the source image to the displayed output image.

Each particle class is defined with a color in the debug.jpg image

It's really amazing, but the result is a bit spooky. Still, pretty awesome.

Yeah very unnerving. It is also nearly as hairy as i am hahaha (long haired danish dude here)

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