Sunday, March 8, 2009

How to make a record...

Ok..
So, in my previous post, you had seen how Bernett used 1521 cubes to make a portrait of Marilyn monroe.. I just came to know that this was a record. But it is not a guinness record because they hadn't been informed about it beforehand.

Anyways, after seeing this, my crazy mind took over in wondering how it can be done. And what you can do to get yourself in the record book.

Let's take an example. You want to make a portrait with 10,000 cubes.

1) How can you make the portrait...?

Bernett used 1521 cubes, i.e with 39 rows x 39 columns.
Each rubik's cube has 6 faces. and each face will have 9 tiles (i.e 3 x 3) of 6 possible colours. So, thats 54 tiles. But for us we need only one face. so that means only 9 tiles are used from one rubik's cube..
Here he's used 39x39 cubes, and each face has 3x3 tiles, which means there are
39x39x3x3 = 117x117 = 13689 tiles.
Its the same as saying that the picture is made up of 13689 pixels. Or to say, it has a resolution of 117x117 pixels.

So, what we have to do is get a picture of whatever resolution we want and then get the details of each pixel. Now, in any pixel there will be three basic colours RGB, with a varying intensity of each colour, so what we can do is get the closest possible colour of that pixel to one of the six colours of a rubik's cube (white, yellow, red, orange, blue, green) so that we'll have the whole pixel details of the huge portrait that you want to do.
Take every 3x3 grid of the huge portrait and then arrange the rubik's cube's face to that combination of the colours. Do this for every grid and voila, you'll end up with the huge portrait.

In our example, since we'll be using 10,000 cubes. The resolution will actually be 300x300.

2) Cost
The cost of the whole thing will depend on how big your portrait is because that many rubik's cubes you will need.
The original rubik's cube cost about Rs. 250.. so, its better not to get those.
Get low quality ones that u generally find in jaathres and melas... they are only some Rs. 15.
Spending Rs, 10,000 will get you only some 666 cubes, the more you spend the more cubes you'll have and the bigger the portrait will be.

For 10,000 cubes, you will need Rs. 1,50,000/-
A really huge amount... :)

3) Time
It takes a maximum of some 45 secs for me to get any set of colours on 1 face. Its given that bernett actually took 13 hours or so and he did it all by himself. But lets see how much time I might need to get the whole portrait done.
45 x 10000 = 450000 secs = 7500 minutes = 125 hours = nearly 5 days non-stop....

phew!!!

4) Space
Each cube is around 55mm x 55mm x 55mm. Considering only the length and breadth for all the 100x100 cubes, it'll take about
5500mm
or 5.5 m x 5.5 m..
or to say 30.25 square metres

That size is actually bigger than the rooms in our hostel...


Anyways, If anyone is up for it.. one can make a record..... :)

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