While I was going through my old portfolio blog I found an entry about a spiral raster project I did with Anders Person in 2004.

Inspired by the works of Billy Klüwer and computer art produced by Experiments in Arts and Technology (EAT) me and Anders Persson wrote an application to raster images using a single line with variable width. At close range images rastered in this manner appear as spirals, as the viewer moves farther away the subject appears.

The above image is a low resolution copy of a spiral raster of Joey Heatherton. The larger originals have a much greater impact, unfortunately I can’t find them. I still have the source code though so one day I might make some new ones…

The result of my thesis work at the MSc. in Media Technology and Engineering program at Linkoping University is Pixgis, a novel application for map-centric management of photographs.

Pixgis is an interactive environment in which photographs may be discovered, viewed and managed through maps. With Pixgis finding photographs from a specific location or of a particular structure is as easy as finding the location or structure on a map. As Pixgis simultaneously displays maps, photographs and spatial metadata it also enables users to analyze photographs in new manners.

My thesis report presents Pixgis, illustrates the benefits of applications for map-centric management of photographs, exposes the problems one faces when implementing such applications and presents novel solutions to many of these problems. The thesis also elaborates on spatial metadata and methods for acquisition of photographs with embedded spatial metadata (i.e geotagging).

The application and the concepts it is built upon has received interest from camera and GPS manufacturers as well as potential end users such as disaster-aid organizations, archaeologists and city-planners.

Click on the image above to see a larger screen shot of the application in action. Pixigis is a Mac OS X application developed in Objective C / Cocoa.

Download the report: Pixgis - Thesis Report (10MB, PDF)

This document describes my implementation of the fakefur method as a Renderman shader. The fakefur method is a probabilistic lighting model for thin coats of fur over skin. It was originally developed by Dan B Goldman at Industrial Light and Magic and has been used in films such as 101 Dalmatians and Mars Attacks. The method approximates visual characteristics of fur, such as glossy sheen and soft illumination, at image resolutions where individual hairs are not visible. A bidirectional reflectance distribution function, BRDF, subsurface shading model is used as the lighting model for the underlying skin, which shows through when the fur is thin.

Read the report (pdf): fakefur.pdf