3D Sort

Origins

This project has evolved from SeekHue. It began as a conversation in a parking lot after my programming boot camp one day. While speaking with another classmate, I threw out the idea of taking the Mona Lisa, extracting its pixels, reorganizing them based on their hue, and continue to call it the Mona Lisa.

I thought this would be a fun, Dadaist adventure in pushing the art world's buttons, but it has evolved into so much more.

Color Spaces

Early in the production of SeekHue, I was confronted with the problem of multidimensionality. Color exists in our computers as an tuple of red, green, blue values between 0 and 255. Trying to map this three-dimensional object, color, into two-dimensions, the flat surface of a painting, created a lot of noise. The original transformations were less than impressive as the crude sorted method in python sorts a three-dimensional tuple by its first value, in this case the red value of each pixel, and only touches on green and blue if red values are the same.

To reduce noise, I had to research new color systems. I turned from RGB models to hue, lightness, and saturation values (HLS). HLS is a cylindrical color model where the hue value determines the specific color, from 0 to 360 degrees, while lightness and saturation determine its quality. This conversion reduced the dimensionality of my data and produced much less noisy 2D mappings based on hue.

Mona Lisa

Sorted by RGB

Sorted by HLS

RGB and the Science of Sight

It wasn't until I visited a few meet ups around the Portland area that a new idea was born and this project. Augmented reality tech allowed me not to compromise the dimensionality of the data and map it into its native RGB. In addition to creating really cool scatter plots, keeping the data in its native RGB better mimics the science of how we see.

Our eyes can only see three wavelengths of light: red, green, and blue. The million colors that we perceive are combinations of these three wavelengths only. It is not a coincidence that the pixels in every device and the values our monitors and cell phones use to display color come in red, green, and blue.

AR at the Art Museum

Oregon Story Board has graciously allowed me to utilize their cadre of Microsoft Hololens headsets to bring this project to the Portland Art Museum in November of 2016.

We want to explore this as a potential use of augmented reality technology and are not ready to deliver a fully developed experience to museum visitors.

Contact

For more information about this project and the software that powers it, email me at: andrewtheis4@gmail.com