I have a minor fetish for slick but slightly Rube Goldbergian technology that is utilized to achieve simple aims, which is why I love the idea of the punch camera, which captures an image, arranges little pins internally, and then lets the user punch the camera like a stapler to create a sort of dot-matrix/hole-punch rendition of the image. The camera is, alas, only a concept which was conceived by bay area design student Matty Martin. See the rest of Matty’s portfolio here. The punch camera concept reminded me of a sculptural design project by Daniel Bozen called Shiny Balls Mirror, which was one of a series of interactive sculptures which use a camera to capture whatever is in front of the sculpture to re-arrange objects to reflect the image back at the viewer in real time. I think Matty and Danny should talk to each other about an exhibit. See more of Danny’s sculptures here. And as is inevitably the case for search addicts like myself, while tracking down these links to share, I accidentally ran across this crazy Image Mosaic Generator, which lets you upload a photo, and then converts the image to a pixelated version with images that it automatically scours from the web. The results don’t look too impressive until you zoom in on the image, and realize how varied the images are, and how they were automatically snagged from the web and assembled into a single image. There’s an example below.

The example below isn’t very interesting until you see it full size.

A subject gazing into Danny Bozen’s Shiny Balls:

The punch camera process: