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We’ve released our second iteration of Wosaic just in time for the Engineering Open House at the University of Illinois. At the Engineering Open House, we created over 120 mosaics for people, and won 3rd place for the non-technical theme.

This new release represents a major rewrite in the code for the GUI and general control flow. While this won’t be immediately apparent at first glance, this means major efficiency gains and better stability. You can now create multiple mosaics in the same session, and even cancel processing mid-generation. Also, the resolution parameters don’t take effect until saving, which means you can save a Mosaic at a variety of different resolutions.

For more details, check out the Release Notes, which also contains links to other useful wiki pages. Or, head straight for the download page to grab a copy of the latest version. Keep reading below for a walk-through to create your first mosaic.

The first step in using Wosaic is getting it installed on your computer. If you haven’t already, head over to the download page and grab the version for your computer. I’ll be using Ubuntu Linux, so I downloaded wosaic-install-unix-v1beta.jar. You’ll need a current version of Java to run it, which should already be installed on your machine. If not, head on over to Sun’s java download page and pickup the latest JVM for your machine. Once you’ve got java, double-click on the Wosaic installer to run. The prompts are pretty self-explanatory– just follow the instructions on each to install Wosaic on your computer.

Once you have Wosaic installed, go ahead and run the program. A shortcut is generally created during the install, in the default location. When you first launch, you’re greated with a basic interface, ready to start configuring your mosaic.

On the first tab of the interface, there are a few different boxes you will need to configure:

• The Source Image is the picture that you want to create a mosaic of. For instance, I’m using a picture of my alma mater.
• The Search String is the query that will be used to find the sub-pictures, if you use Flickr (explained later). Pictures of small, specific objects tend to produce better mosaics. For example, I’m using “eye”, although “flower”, “cat”, or even “face” tend to produce good mosaics.
• The Resolution determines how many small pictures will make up the large picture in each row. Choosing a good number is important here– the larger the resolution, the better the overall mosaic will look. However, it will also be harder to see the individual sub-pictures. The default is 35, although I like to use somewhere around 65.

There are also some more options that are available in the Advanced tab:

• The Mosaic Dimensions determine the size of the mosaic when you save it. You can use the original size of the picture, a multiple of it, or enter your own dimensions. If you scale the dimensions to 3, it’s generally easier to see the individual sub-pictures. Note that these settings don’t take effect until you actually save the mosaic.
• You can also enable or disable different sources. Sub-pictures will be drawn from each enabled source, based on its configuration. The Facebook plugin will use pictures of you on Facebook, the Filesystem plugin uses photo albums on your computer, and Flickr does a search for the search term on the first tab.
• You can also Configure settings for the individual plugins. For example, I am using the Flickr plugin, which allows you to specify the number of pictures to search for. The default value is 500, but the more pictures, the better. Although it takes longer, I’m going to use 5000.

Once you’ve configured all the options, the only thing that’s left is to create your mosaic! Go back to the first tab, and hit Generate to start creating the mosaic. As pictures are gathered from each source, they are analyzed as Wosaic attempts to fit them into the mosaic. As new matches are found, they are displayed on the screen. With default settings, it generally takes around 30 seconds to process. When it’s done, you should see a pretty nice looking mosaic.

If you save the mosaic to your computer, you can zoom on the individual sub-pictures for a better view. Also, the mosaics make very nice desktop backgrounds. Have you made any great-looking mosaics? Share your ideas in the comments!

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