File this one under interesting people doing cool things.
“I was playing around with emoji and unicode points and realized the newish skin tone emoji modifiers allowed this sort of thing,” Brooklyn developer Zach Schwartz explained about his latest project, Father Christmas. “Plus it’s cool that they exist now. So I made this ‘software mirror’, to use Danny Rozin’s term. I’m working on a more complex version where the emoji for each pixel is mapped to color rather than just brightness, which looks way better and will involve non-Santa emoji for sure.”
It’s the best thing your laptop camera has done all day.
Try it
Schwartz is not new to making interesting things. In October 2015 he released a map of death in New York. The idea for a death map came out of a serious bike accident that sent him to the hospital and nearly killed him.
