Category: 08-FinalPhase2

• Project overview
  • I want to train my own GAN with images from this Instagram account: subwayhands.
• Related work
  • GANshare: Creating and Curating Art with AI for Fun and Profit
  • Kishi Yuma: GAN trained on pictures of hands

• • Mario Klingemann: Turn finger drawings into a GAN generated image

• • Gloomy Sunday

• Technical Implementation:
  • Instagram Scraping Tools/Tutorials
    • Apify – Instagram Scraper:  I played around with this tool for a bit. Overall, it’s really easy to use. Pros: fast, easy, I don’t need to do much other than inputting the Instagram page link. Cons: It crapes a lot of information, some of which are irrelevant to me. This requires me to filter/clean up the output file.  And is doesn’t directly output the pictures, instead, it provides the display URL for each image, and the URL expires after a certain amount of time.
    • GitHub – Instagram scraper :
      • There is a youtube tutorial showing how to use this.
      •  I simply could not get this one to work on my laptop, though it sees to work for others. Need to play around with this a bit more.
    • Python library  – BeautifulSoup:
      • stack overflow post
      • Will need to parse the rendered with something like Selenium.
    • Alternative method: Manually screenshot pictures
      • Although this is boring, redundant work, it gives me more control on what pictures I want to use to train my GAN.
  • Pix2Pix: If time allows, I want to look into using webcam to record hand posture and generate images based on realtime camera input.

Because I am finishing up previous projects, this post will be about telematic experiences. I want to make a simple game or communication method for friends online, I looked at some apps and websites that I enjoy playing or using with my friends.

One game that me and my friends played a lot during quarantine was Drawphone. Basically, each person in the group draws a prompt given by another person in the group and it continues like the game telephone. A simple drawing game like this brings a lot of joy and laughter, which is something I want to emulate.

Also, I took some inspiration from upperclassmen in design who created a website/application called Pixel Push. The project allows for groups of friends to draw together using their webcams as the paintbrush. They used simple tools like HTML, p5.js, Socket.io, and Google teachable machine to achieve the end result. These are technologies we learned about in class, so I didn’t have to research about them.