ZapMachine

Revival of the old ZapMachine. A collage machine that merges random images layer by layer remaining about 50% of the original images

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ApFab - Zap Machine V0.9.0

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Zap stands for 'Zapped Artificial Picture', a collage made from Internet images. A Zap translates a set of words or a text into an image which reflects the visual representation of the words on the Internet.

This web application, Zap Machine, needs a number of words as input. It then takes the most relevant image that search engine Yahoo comes up with. After having collected all images the Zap Machine creates a given number of different collages from those images.

installation

First you need to run a server with PHP. Please do not use a Windows machine for this purpose, while Windows suck. ApFab recommends Linux or Mac;)

ApFab Zap Machine needs some PHP extensions:

• JSON (default installed)
• CUrl (default installed)
• Imagick (Image Magick image processing Class)

You need to acquire the following API key and put it into conf/conf.php:

1. Brave Search API Key - https://api.search.brave.com/

See conf/conf.php for the exact constant names to use.

Adjust permission (chmod 777) for Sessions folder, run index.html, fill in the form and voila.

how it works

• index.html contains user interface
• user input put into Session variables in init.php
• display.inc.php dynamically displays two img tags that are loaded in turn with image data from zap.php using display.js
• zap.php downloads images one by one using imgSearch Class
• zap.php processes collages one by one using imgProcess Class
• All downloaded images, collage images and logfiles(feature is far from ready yet) are put in a folder named 'Session/zap'.date()
• the machine is ready when an error is loaded into img document class. (a weak point in our construction)

yet to come

• Logfile also generated in imgProcess Class (0.9.2)
• Number and camera filename (virgin images) input (0.9.3)
• Proper stop meganism (0.9.1)
• better error handling: dead links give dynamicly generated image thats allso used in collage (0.9.3)
• visualisation of logfile, so viewers can see what is happening (0.9.1)
• replacing all 'random' image processing parameters (0.7)