PixelPusher - New Project Idea

I've been thinking a little bit about ways of visualizing images that are different from the rectangular pixels I usually see. I've built a Processing sketch that changes the rectangles into other shapes, and that's nice. The individual elements don't need to be on a rectangular grid, but could be hexagonal or triangular, or other tessellating shapes.
I also really like the motion of physics simulations in Processing, and I thought maybe an image could be made by repelling and attracting pixels that settle into irregular patterns but communicate gradations none the less. I learned to do this in illustration school when it was called stippling.

Without any work in code yet, I've mocked up what this might look like. It's only black and white so far, but color could be added (either RGB or CMYK or something else).



Pixel Field: Evenly spaced pixels waiting for a source image


Source Image: Pixels repelled and attracted by the dark and light areas of the photo

A related Processing sketch here

Airplane Shadows _ Mockup 1

Airplane Shadows _ Mockup 1, originally uploaded by mdshaub.

A quick mockup of a project idea. I love the flight patterns project from years past, and have always wanted to build something similar. Seeing a number of airplane shadows pass over my office gave me this idea. I hope to build an airplane shadow map using flight position, altitude, heading, and aircraft type coupled with calculations for sun angles.

The scale and speed should be pretty accurate, 100 foot long plane traveling at 570 mph (about 830 feet per sec). That's pretty fast, viewing at this scale.

Putting the results into Google Maps would be step 1, though I'd love that in Google Earth you'd see the shadows rolling over hills.