Printed Space

Imagine walking into a room and stepping on clouds, with the sky showing around you, and the bright sun in a corner. Imagine walking into a room and stepping on the ocean floor, with all kinds of fish and mysterious creatures surrounding you. Imagine walking into a room and stepping on a grassy field, with a forest all around you, your own personal oasis.

All of this can be done, because of a company called Printed Space. They take photos and turn them into high resolution wallpaper, flooring, blinds, and canvases. These can be used to decorate homes, establishments, and even public spaces...

I found this website just randomly, but after looking through it for a while, I realized that my dentist has a printed beach scene in his office. Upon further investigation, I found that the graffiti artist Banksy had used the same one as my dentist to create the illusion of a hole in an Israeli security wall. 


Sidenote: this is a fantastic example of media being used not in the way it was intended. But it is also a fantastic example of showing meaning through images.

I think that Printed Space has a brilliant product. It is already becoming popular, and I think that it is going to tip very soon, especially considering the continually increasing resolution of common cameras. People's may soon be able to use their own photos on their walls, etc.

printing on a bridge

printing in an airplane 

 

 printing in a train station

TinEye

Logos are great, and so are popular posters or ads - anything that is very well-known.

It is best at finding manipulations of very common images or photo - ones that are similar to the original, but that have been changed in some way.

You provide a photo, by upload or URL, and it finds images that are similar.

TinEye is a reverse image search.

TinEye works great for finding spoofs of images, different sizes of images, and just edited images. It usually has several pages-worth of findings, and the beginning ones are usually resized images; the later ones are the edits and spoofs.

The only problem is that it doesn't work very well yet. I tried about six images before I got one that it was able to find. It is apparently either very finicky and precise, or its database is currently just too small.

If it worked well enough, this would be a fantastic resource for finding all kinds of images. I hope they continue adding to their database so that less popular images can be found. But as it is, TinEye is still a good resource for finding spoofs of very popular images. It's good for at least that - but hey, it's only in beta testing.