Personalizations

The title may be misleading here: personalization. But this reflects quite good what is will encompass:

• Demo text: when the application runs in demo mode you can place your personal message here. Like 'Please contact blahblah on telephone number 0800-blah'. The text must fit in the provided space to avoid that the text will not be placed in full on the mosaic width. The text is stored in the project file.
• Picture transitions of the commercials. There are four possible transitions: two for 'transform' in and out of the picture, and the other two for a video commercial. These settings are also stored in the project file.
• The transition time (in seconds): this is the time to transform the from mosaic to the commercial and vice versa. A good value is 3-5 seconds, but it's a matter of taste, try-out and most important: speed of the system. An i3 system will not perform very well at high transition speed, so 5 seconds may just be fine, whereas 2.5 seconds is still performing great on an i7 system.

Animation settings

The animation is a very strong almost unique mosaic feature never seen before! It will scramble each cell of the existing mosaic on the screen into a random pattern, or a shape of a selected picture 'mask'. We have called it a mask because it will only reposition each tile in the black areas of the miniature mask picture, avoiding any time to be placed in the white area. This way all kinds of logo's (commercial or not), fun and playful, can be shown. Each transition from mosaic to the shape is done in a very exciting manner. All the settings are stored in the project file. The controls are:

• Animation duration: the duration of the entire animation in seconds. Basically the transition is done twice: from mosaic to random/shape, and back again.
• Frame rate: the amount of frames that is generated to make the animation. On i3 systems the frame rate should be between 10 and 15, for i5 between 15 and 20, and for i7 above 25, but not larger than 30. This frame rate must be found by trial and error and must be done off-line a show where the mosaic application is used.
• Frequency (times per hour): the frequency of how often an animation must be shown. This value should not be too high, in order to avoid that mainly animations are played, and hardly new pictures are taken in. On the other hand, the dynamics can be set to the minimum while constantly showing animations is certainly possible by setting the correct combination of dynamics and animations.
• Movement path: select the animation movement path from mosaic to random/shape. The paths are a combination of end-point selection, and how the movement will be between start and end-point. (Start-point = tile position in the mosaic; End-point = tile position in the shape or random point). The first path is 'Use selected mask' which activates the mask option; all the other movement paths will generate a random end-point for each tile (but still in a beautiful pattern). The second option 'Use a random mask' will randomly select a mask from the list with every new animation.
• Force animation will start an animation as soon as the dynamic mosaic sequence allows for it (i.e. when pause timer becomes active).
• Test animation only works when the dynamic mosaic sequence is not active and a recent mosaic picture has been created ('Inital Mosaic' button). This is particularly useful to test and select the desired movement path for the show.
• The masks : the selected mask shows a red box.New masks can be added by the technician. Only the masks that are found at application start-up are found in this mask grid. The technician therefore has to do a bit of homework:
  • create a mask, e.g. in Photoshop. The mask should not be too large, the installed masks are only 266 x 188 pixels in size. The mask must be black and white only. Do not use gray scale colors, the application rigorously only select pixels that are white.
  • add the mask file in the mask folder (default: 'C:\Users\Public\Documents\APP\Dynamic Mosaic\Masks'), and then restart the application. The mask will be visible in the mask grid overview.

Some examples:

Example 1: "Blowing to right - Rain"

Example 2: "Use a mask" - the airplane mask