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That's the side of the dome!
Inspiration
On Reg Day, my advisor Vladimir Bulovic asked me if I knew how to make a website or an app. I asked him if he wanted me to make something. He showed me a huge picture of MIT and told me that the picture contained the names of everyone affiliated with MIT since 1861. Each name was 4 microns long. Human hair is 100 microns long. He said that he was making a bigger picture where each name would be visible to the human eye and asked me if I could make a website by October 4th, the grand opening of the MIT Nano Building, where the user can search his/her name and find where it was in the picture.
What it does
Our website allows the user to search his/her name and then find out where their name is in the building.
How we built it
We took a 383 MB file of the image and broke it down into smaller image files. Then, we OCRed it and made a table which contained name, box number (which image file it was from) and line number. We queried the first and the last name and if the box and line number were matching, we show the user where their name is.
Challenges we ran into
The original file of all images was 383 MB. It was difficult to work with such a vast file. Adobe Illustrator and other Adobe products, we found were quite limited. Furthermore, the image was not a text file so it was quite a difficult venture to try to find out all the names and locations in the image.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The MIT professor responsible for creating the image said extracting the names and locations would take three weeks or more. He dissuaded us from trying to tackle it during a weekend. We managed to extract everything within a day!
What we learned
What's next for OneMIT
We'll be making the website more aesthetically attractive so that we are ready in time for October 4th!
