The Portrait Style Station was created for Chattanooga's Creative Discovery Museum. Technically, it is a simplification of the Digital Darkroom.

The display shows a live image, and a number of transforms. The transforms mutate the image in various ways suggestive of the artistic styles of various painters and schools. The image itself may be frozen or unfrozen by tapping the image. A config file can be supplied that will set the buttons to any Unicode string (UTF-8) format, which should allow for internationalization.

The transforms include the originals as designed by the folks in Chattanooga, plus a number of new ones. Some of the new ones are appropriate and cool, others are just fun. I leave it to the Chattanooga folks to pick the ones they want in the final version.

The user interface is designed for a touch screen, but any mouse should work fine. The keyboard is only used for certain administrative and test commands, and should not be reachable by the public. The standard NTSC video stream is captured by a cheap Hauppaugh WIN/TV card. The center 320x240 bits are used, providing a digital zoom.

Status - 8 Aug. 2004

This exhibit is nearly ready to go. I need to have the folks in Chattanooga select the transforms they would like, and I need to add the attract-loop code. I also need to make the video settings configurable to allow for adjustments for local lighting.

Screen Shots

Here are some screen shots of the prototype. I am pretty happy with the interface. These samples were taken in a low-light area, so the captured images are not that great. There should be some light on the face, and there probably should be a blank background.

Note that the real-time display rate is shown on the screen. These are live transforms.