Computerized Lego Art Project gives a kick to Google engineers

Justin Voskuhl a Google engineer moved into a new place and in a bid to fight boredom and figure out something to cover a large barren wall in his living room, one weekend developed a program that would take a source picture, establish the most optimized colors, Lego brick sizes and orientations in order to reproduce the source image completely in Legos.

I moved into a new place about ten months ago, and had a huge blank wall in the main room. So I decided to make some funky Lego art for the walls.

I started with some square nature images, and wrote some Java code to use a simulated annealing technique to figure out a layout for Lego bricks that when stacked on each other look like the image (but also try to minimize cost of the parts, and also try to ensure the result has some structure rigidity - these images are held together only by
gravity and the Lego bricks themselves - no glue.

So the Java program runs for about ten hours for each image, spits out a preview and parts list and some HTML that you can print out to use as a diagram to assemble the whole thing. The assembly time took about fifteen hours for each image. I enslaved some graduate student friends of mine and traded free dinner for time in my Lego sweatshop.

Check out the results. Each image is pretty different, but all with a nature theme. For scale purposes each one is a 34×34 inch square. The Legos are stacked 250 rows high, and 100 “lego nubs” wide. The maple leaves are on a background that dithered a LOT but I thought it was a feature since it really shows off the fact that these are just
stacks of Lego bricks.

(Check out the images after the jump)