Computer-Aided Lego Art Project

rsk writes "Justin Voskuhl, a Google engineer, in a 2-fold bid to fight boredom and figure out something to cover a large barren wall in his living room, one weekend developed a Java program using an annealing algorithm to figure out the best layout and colors of Lego blocks to reproduce a source image exclusively in Lego blocks inside a frame. He plans to release the source code soon. I probably would have just painted the wall ..."

Similar

[Arngautr]

OK, I have to show off - I did something similar four years ago.
Post [cgsociety.org]
Webpage [lunarpages.com]
I'm a much better programmer now, just for the record. :)

In a frame on his wall? Really?

[greg_barton]

How about glass tiles on a 100'x30' wall, [hzgstudio.org] or a 30'x75' [geocaching.com] wall?

I wrote the code [java.net], my brother in law did the hard parts. [flickr.com]

Re:Prior Art

[amyhughes]

For a time LEGO sold a few grey-scale mosaics, but even better you could upload an image and they'd send you pieces in black, white and three shades of grey, and instructions to create your image. If you just wanted the pieces (they were 1x1 plates) you could upload an image that had shades in the proportions you needed. And since they sent you bags (of IIRC 270) and not exact counts, you could create an image that maximized the number of pieces you'd receive. If your image required 271 dark grey pieces, for example, you'd get two bags of 270.