Shadow Casting Photo Panels

I designed a customizable thing that converts a photo to a printable panel. The size of each pixel in the panel varies according to the brightness of the corresponding pixel in the image. The pixel shapes are connected and held in place by thin strips, kind of like beads on a string. The idea is that when viewed at a distance, or as a cast shadow, the connecting strips are blurred and the image appears more clearly. Here’s the picture of me I printed as a test:

The script isn’t very efficient – it evidently takes hours to process images much larger than the icon-sized 20×20 default – but it is rewarding to see people use it nonetheless. Here are two beautiful examples, both modified to print higher resolution images:

Posted on Monday, April 7th, 2014.