Share puzzle image album: https://checker-big-sing.glitch.me/
Ally and I worked together on this project. We first started with the idea of a collaborated image collage space where users can upload, edit and place their image pieces on a shared canvas. But we struggled with the freehand cropping feature, which is kinda crucial to collaging.
We then pivoted our idea to make a collaborative puzzle space, where different users can upload images via URL and the image will be processed to look like a puzzle piece. The reason for choosing a puzzle shape is that it has a well-perceived affordance of being picked up and moved around. And the goal wasn’t really to complete a cohesive big picture, but more about forming arbitrary and somewhat random subgroups of connections from different users’ pieces. However, this depends a lot on the user being able to move each piece, which is not supported in this current version. This really subtracted from our goal and made the project less interactive/interesting and more like an online album. It defiantly needs a lot more work moving forward.
challenges/next step:
-
- image information is stored in a way that’s harder to retrieve and update.
- each piece needs to be movable
- not much freedom on the user’s side; no further edits to the picture
- UI can use more refinements
- some urls cannot be recognized(blank puzzle piece), depends on where the url is gotten from