Drops of the world.

Expanding on yesterdays idea, I’ve just put together a processing sketch which takes a ‘panoid’ (extracted from streetview links), and creates a printable net of the location.

To create the net, I modeled the drop in blender, and used its handy ‘unfold’ python script (scripts > mesh > unfold).  This creates an svg of the flattened net, which I imported to illustrator to change line weights and add tabs for gluing everything together.

Streetview tiles

Blender model

Rendered.

Unfolded net.

Added tabs.

The processing sketch takes a ‘panoid’, which can be extracted from the link to a google street view.  It then extracts the image tiles, and squashes them to fit the net, before saving it out as a jpg.  At the moment, it’s making pretty small files (water droplets of the world), which may be modified in future to create higher-res, larger nets.

It’d also be nice to have this accept an address, and do the geocoding to find the nearest streetview point.  Looks like this should be possible with the services google are now offering (getNearestPanoramaLatLng()).  With this in place, it could all be wrapped nicely in a user-friendly website.

There are definitely still some problems with the mapping of images to the net that will be resolved when making a higher resolution version, but it’ll be interesting to see what these look like once printed and assembled.

The processing files can be downloaded here: dotw.

Streetview Baubles / a drop of the world

Just started a processing sketch which pulls images from Google streetview, and maps them to the outside of a Christmas bauble or rain drop.  It seems like there are a few things which could be done with it.  Besides the obvious digital spinning / pin on a map / morphing objects, it might be nice to have it create printable nets of a place which could be printed and folded up into little drops of the world.

New Year’s Photos

New flickr set made up of images from a North West Coast Adventure in America.

New site & blog

deepfriedconcepts has just been updated!  There’s still lots to come on the proceeding pages – I’ll add more details about the projects, and link to them online where possible.  In the mean time, some of them can still be viewed on the archived pages here.

This blog will be about design challenges and solutions as and when I face them.