The Mint Gargoyle

[simont]

When I clean my teeth, it's generally one end or other of the day, so I have a high tendency to be half asleep. Sometimes, this causes me to put rather too much toothpaste on the brush. The result of this is that I get through the brushing and rinsing fine, but then my tongue suddenly notices that things are rather mintier than I'd bargained for.

When this happens, my instinctive response is to try to get as much fresh air around my tongue as I can, which involves simultaneously sticking my tongue out as far as it will go and opening my mouth very wide. This looks very silly in the mirror, not surprisingly, but it seems to help me cool off faster; and the appearance has always vaguely reminded me of something.

Today I realised: it reminds me of a gargoyle. My eyes narrow in an evil-looking way in the process of pulling the face, simply because there isn't room for wide open eyes and a wide open mouth in the same face at the same time. You could probably sculpt the face of Simon-having-used-too-much-toothpaste and put it on the wall of a castle, and it wouldn't look too out of place. The Mint Gargoyle.

Comments

[fanf]

JPG!

[simont]

It did occur to me, but I think just taking a photo would be unambitious. Ideally I'd want to do a 3D scan of my head, and raytrace the result with a stone texture. That'd make a good user icon, I think :-)

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

If you take the pictures, I can do the reconstruction.

You can probably do the reconstruction anyway...

[simont]

Ooh, how do you do that? It was just vaguely occurring to me that it ought to be possible in principle to generate a half-decent 3D description of a face starting from two photos taken from slightly different angles à la binocular vision, but the image processing struck me as scary. Is this something that's already conveniently available in some software package, then?

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Yes, sort of.

It's already been done for transmitted rays, because our research group do it. Reflected rays are a bit more complicated but possible, so now thinking about it I don't think I could reconstruct it by putting it into our code like I thought initially. The thing to google for, I reckon, is epipolar geometry, and then write some sort of convergent iterative routine based on it. I could probably do it in a couple of months in IDL if I wanted to. You would probably need more than two pictures because you need depth perception of the features that are present in one but not the other. The more pictures you have the less error is in the reconstruction.

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

What he said! Gimme one and I'll draw it for you. <3 :)

[atreic.livejournal.com]

That reminds me of a themepark I used to get taken to as a kid, where they had a castle entirely made out of sweets. They'd have liked a mint gargoyle :-) (Castle pics here (http://www.sundownadventureland.co.uk/picture.asp))

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Not real sweets, sadly.

[simont]

Ah, of course, yes! Instead of sculpting my toothpaste-enhanced face out of rock, one should of course sculpt it out of mint. Obvious in retrospect.

That reminds me of a silly conversation I had a week or two ago, though I can't quite remember with whom: someone suggested that it should be possible to buy little mints sculpted into the shape of Star Wars stormtroopers' helmets – Mint Imperials :-)

[lnr]

Wow, I clicked the link, and got a page with a flash paceholder in the middle. Then I tried to scroll down to see if there was something below it, and the placeholder started getting bigger and bigger, both horizontally and vertically. It's stopped now, but it's enormous! V weird.