Floor Covering Weekly - March 17, 2008

Floor Covering Weekly
March 17, 2008

High Definition Mosaics
Tile maker uses artificial intelligence
by Tanja Kern

San Francisco-based mosaic studio Exactmosaics uses state of the art technology to create highly detailed mosaics without the help of a paintbrush, stain or digital printer. Through the use of artificial intelligence software, the company photographs and catalogs the natural color and veining of marble or wood tiles and draws on these reserves to create any image, from a photo and painting replications to company logos.

We were looking at ways to apply reverse pattern recognition to mosaics, said Nick Berg, who founded the company with Alan Roth in 2006. "When you think about a little piece of marble, there's a lot of unique pattern to each stone. There are veins and speckles. We photographed each stone and cataloged it for future use."

The create mosaics by photographing millions of tiles made from natural materials. Next, Berg and Roth use proprietary technology to evaluate the shape, texture and colors within each tile. Each stone is then individually selected and handplaced to compose the larger image.

Ancient civilizations have made tile mosaics as far back as 500 B.C. The art form, although beautiful, was constructed using basic shapes and the colors tile artisans had on hand at the time.

"Ancient mosaic artists could not have acheived the level of visual detail of an Exactmosaic piece because they faced human limitations in memory capacity," Roth explains. "A mosaic artist in ancient Rome would have needed perfect visual recall of several thousand stones to render the same level of detail." Unlike paintings or photographs, the marble mosaics won't experience color fading or deteriorate over time.

To order a project, customers send a photograph or image to the Exactmosaics studio in San Francisco. Once the image is entered into the system, employees in the team's workshop in Guangzhou, China, begin pulling pieces to create it. It's pretty labor intensive," Berg said. "A square foot can take five or six hours to make." Designs can be proofed within a week and the actual mosaic usually arrives within four to six weeks.

So far, Roth and Berg have signed on three retailers to help market their mosaics and they are also partnering with art galleries to get the word out about the art form. "We went to SURFACES to find more retailers and get more of a retial distribution," Berg added. In addition, the team is targeting commercial interior designer and architects. At $250 per square foot, and a minimum of 5 square feet per order, the projects aren't cheap. "The effect is more impressive on a large scale - it's really high-definition mosaics," Berg noted. FCW