Still addicted to the new Birdseye images for Australia in the latest imagery additions from Microsoft I thought it would be cool to make a PhotoMosaic from the Virtual Earth assets.
(Click to see full resolution using Silverlight Deep Zoom.)
A PhotoMosaic is essentially a Mosaic of photos arranged together to look like another photo from a distance. I remember seeing my first one in the 90’s, it was iconic images from Starwars made from actual frames from the movie.
So how did I make this?
Well first thing you need a source image and a tonne of possible images to use as tiles. Now your not allowed to use VE imagery outside of VE so this is not something your allowed do. I hope the post is taken in the spirit of something cool and promotional for Virtual Earth….
So I grabbed the awesome picture of the Sydney Opera House from maps.live.com and a tonne of tiles from the road and aerial views around the Sydney area from my Internet cache. Then I used an awesome free tool from Andrea Denzler called AndreaMosaic.
It totally rocks, runs on Vista 64bit and chews through the processing in seconds. You essentially point it to the folder of images, give it the source image, set a few things and hit go. Full tutorial here.
So the output is a 18,000×11,251 image @ 120MB. Very cool but how do I get this on the web to show you? Using Deep Zoom in Silverlight2 of coarse!
The new version of Deep Zoom Composer is out, some nice little fixes, but the killer new feature is to save it out directly as a Silverlight2 project. Pop this on your web server and your away.
I’ll write up some detailed instructions on using Deep Zoom Composer and Silverlight Streaming over the weekend for those that are interested.