Visualizing: Sense of (small) scale

Making initial experiments with scale. Used the USB microscope to take images at the two magnifications available (20x and 400x). I was really intrigued with the surface of the computer…both because it was readily available and because the metal is actually quite pitted rather than smooth. There is also a lot of “stuff” in and around the keyboard…I suppose that it’s not just a myth that computer keyboards are some of the dirtiest places around.

So, this sketch just aligns images of the speaker grille of a MacBook Pro taken at three magnification levels. The scale on the left allos the user to drag smoothly to any scale, and there are keyboard shortcuts for the three images (1,2,3).

Ultimately, I’d like to push beyond the final photo and into the pixels which comprise a digital image, but the relationship of a particular magnification of a physical object to it’s bits is abstract and would have to be resolved in some manner. More time to play…

Applet and code.