… Make Beautiful Baby Pics with Kaleidoscope App

Last time, I’ve shown you how to make hyperbolic tilings of photos, which was great fun already. Well, let’s step it up a notch–my mathematician brother-in-law has sent me the link for a kaleidoscope app, which creates even crazier and more beautiful images! They appear immediately and don’t take as long to build up as the hyperbolic tiles, and they have a very high resolution, too. They change right before your eyes into hundreds of different combinations when you move either the triangle or the little dial. I admit, I don’t understand the higher mathematics behind this process, but I’ve taken a short movie with my son about how the images change on the screen if you rotate the little triangle on your photo. Even a 3.5-year-old can do it, and all that’s left to do is to save the created image.

I started with Lyons Cub’s newborn picture taken by Daphne Treadway, our baby photographer in Clarksville, Tennessee, who also took his cake-smashing photos. This is what the picture looks like naturally:

Now, all you need to do is to upload your photo to this link: http://geometricolor.ch/images/geometricolor/sphericalKaleidoscopeApp.html

Here are the resulting works of art (I used “regular” and “orthographic” as my favorite settings, and just changed the location of the triangle):

Actually, it looks like I have twins, which is bittersweet, since I did originally, but one was a “vanishing twin” and passed in utero, and the other one was born two months early with IUGR, weighing 3 lbs. I always tell Leander that Emily Rosalyn is with Daddy in heaven and he is here with me, earth side.

The next picture I tried was another baby picture of my son, taken by Daphne:

Here are the resulting kaleidoscopic images (mind you, I always focused on the face, but you can also create really weird images by focusing on the arms or mouth alone 😉 ):

Here’s another cool image from Daphne; it shows Lyons Cub as a 1-year-old in front of his NICU picture, attached to wires:

And this is what the kaleidoscope app will do for you:

Here’s little Lyons Cub playing his toy piano:

And now, I’ve tried with my own pictures. They’re not in pastel colors but more colorful and wilder. I’ll always show the original and the modifications through the kaleidoscope app. But first, here’s my son creating them:

He used the following image of himself in his turtle sandbox at the age of one:

Here are some memories from baby times; he’s in his Fisher-Price activity center:

I like the colors of his giant pool and pelican, so here we go:

And here, he is with his Little People construction set, which makes a colorful sphere:

Below, you can see Lyons Cub and his friend Ella with their ride-on digger in the sandbox:

And finally, here’s Lyons Cub as a fiery dragon on his push-trike:

That’s it; I think you’ve seen enough examples. If you liked what you saw, and if you can still use some fun kaleidoscope pics for your blog, Instagram, FB or wherever, try out this free link: http://geometricolor.ch/images/geometricolor/sphericalKaleidoscopeApp.html

Have fun!

And for those of you who are mathematically inclined, here’s the paper behind these kaleidoscopes:

Stampfli, Peter. “Kaleidoscopes for Non-Euclidean Space,” pp. 67/74. In: Proceedings of Bridges 2018: Mathematics, Art, Music, Architecture, Education, Culture, 2018. Torrence, Eve, Torrence, Bruce, Sequin, Carlo, & Fenyvesi, Kristof (eds.). Phoenix, Arizon: Tessellations Publishing. ISBN: 978-1-938664-27-4. http://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2018/bridges2018-67.pdf