
Create a Robot Image from any text string - e1ven
http://RoboHash.org
======
e1ven
Morning, I created this as an extended-weekend project, after realizing that
I'd need these hashes as a part of larger project I'm working on.

Basically, Text goes in, Picture of a Robot comes out.

Where I'm using this is sort of like an identicon, to help quickly identify a
poster's 4096-bit public keys, and see if you're talking to the same man.

Is it perfect? No, but it's a quick visual guide to any text, in the form of
faces, which are easy for people to remember.

~~~
donpark
Robohash looks great. As the 'inventor' of Identicon, I've been meaning to
revisit the subject with animal (identimal) or robot (identibot) themes in
mind so it's nice to see your rendition of the later. Well done, sir.

~~~
e1ven
Identicons are a great idea, I really love them.. They're a good solution to a
gut-check "Something is wrong here.."

Sort of like a SSH-fingerprint.

The problem I've had with them is that they're generate not all that
memorable. Was that triangles pointing left, then up, or up then left?

This is my attempt at addressing that problem for my own new project, but I'd
love to see what you build! If you want to use these images, feel free.
They're CC-BY, so they're open to the world now ;)

~~~
donpark
Re 'not all that memorable', that's because identicons were originally
designed for 'distinguishing' and 'matching' data, not 'memorizing'.

Abstract geometric identicons like my original implementation as well as
variations used at Wordpress and StackOverflow are, while nearly impossible to
remember, distinguishable in a pile which comes in handy when distinguishing
the 'voice' of individuals in a long thread of comments.

To use identicons as permanent identity, one has to 'identify' with their
identicon. We can identify faces of our friends because we shared memories
with them, stories if you will.

So robotic identicons like yours can be made more memorable if users had some
ways to create a story they can associate with it like 'blue viking with left
arm missing', etc.

~~~
6ren
Using stories is a great idea, but I'm not sure how doable it is to generate
images that suggest a story (certainly, harder than cute variations on
robots); in addition, those stories have to be memorable i.e. make sense, as
stories. I think that's approaching a hard problem, maybe even hard AI.

But I like the idea. Perhaps the image problem could be met by combining it
with a bio (giving a story); and the "make sense" problem could be addressed
by a story grammar (following the hero's myth as a template, with recursive
and optional parts), written using templates consisting of canned pseudo-
english sentences with gaps filled by a set of names, objects, places that
play the various roles in the "hero grammar": the key, the sword, the grail,
the shadow, the mentor, the ordinary world, the special word, various
thresholds - perhaps some word generation for place names. If the story _made
sense_ , as a journey, it might be memorable, even stirring in an awkward way,
despite all the grammar/template/presets...

Of course, maybe I'm wrong: "<color> <warriortype> with <injury>" is already
fairly rich. Even, extending it to incongruous occupations (surgeon, nurse,
motorcyclist, developer). Perhaps, like theatresports, just starting points of
a place, occupation and problem is enough to suggest a story to the user?

~~~
donpark
Right. If employees of Apple gets certificates with O = "Apple" and OU =
"Engineering" which maps to a red apple badge on their robot's body and a gear
mark on the arm, people could potentially learn to 'parse' that at a glance.

Everywhere we look in RL, there are stories being told all the time.

------
MattBearman
I love this, simply because <http://robohash.org/mattbearman> kinda looks like
me :D

My one criticism is that it took me while to figure out (and I'm web dev) It
wasn't clear until quite far down the page that you need to just put the text
string after the URL.

I'd recommend having a text box into which pasted text can be robohashed
prominent on the homepage, as well as clearer instructions.

Edit: just noticed there is a text box, was that there before? It could
definitely be more noticeable :)

~~~
e1ven
I have added a box in the Last 5 minutes based on user-feedback. It's kinda a
hack, but.. It's there ;)

~~~
MattBearman
Ah cool, its good to see you respond quickly to feedback

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praptak
It's similar to the StackOverflow April Fools' Unicorn Avatars:
[http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/37328/my-godits-
full...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/37328/my-godits-full-of-
unicorns)

Which you can try out at: <http://unicornify.appspot.com/use-it>

~~~
e1ven
Woah, That's really cool! I hadn't seen that, but yes, it's designed to be
along the same idea, except more year-round friendly ;)

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tptacek
You write _really_ good web site copy.

~~~
e1ven
Thank you, that's very kind of you to say. The whole project is very silly, so
it doesn't make much sense to take it very seriously ;)

~~~
MartinCron
I'm impressed that you got an endorsement from Cave Johnson. It must be nice
having friends like that.

~~~
jrockway
To be fair, it was just a pre-recorded message.

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erikwiffin
It would be awesome if <http://robohash.org/google.jpg> generated a jpg, and
<http://robohash.org/google.png> generated a png.

It would be even more awesome if <http://robohash.org/favicon.ico> generated a
.ico file.

~~~
e1ven
Google.jpg does generate a jpg, but it's not the same as google.png;

The reason for that is that I'm hashing whatever you send in, including the
extension.. Otherwise, if you passed file.txt and file.mp3 they'd come to the
same hash.

~~~
erikwiffin
I realize what you're doing. This was more of a "really cool feature request"
than a bug report.

favicon.ico does respond with a 404 though.

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evilswan
OMG - π-bot has a cylindrical head! <http://robohash.org/3.14159>

~~~
vijaydev
Looks better than Tau-bot :)

<http://static1.robohash.com/6.28318>

~~~
meric
They do have the same smile.

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jawns
So THIS is what the Googlebot looks like!

<http://robohash.org/google>

~~~
Klinky
Bing just looks like a goofy hipster.

<http://robohash.org/bing>

------
FrankBlack
I think this is broken. I entered, "Bite my shiny, metal ass!" and all I got
was some weird, Barney-like purple robot. I'd suggest special sub-routines for
certain phrases including, but not limited to: "Ex-Ter-Mi-NATE!", "Danger,
Will Robinson!", "Crush, Kill, Destroy!", "Beedeebeedeebeedeebeedee!", "We've
got movie sign!", "Blah, blah, blah", "I'll be back", etc.

;)

~~~
e1ven
For 2.0, I'll add ?popculture=yes ;)

~~~
j79
Hah, that'd be awesome! One of the first strings I tried was "bender".
Considering how fast the image loaded, I'm guessing it was already cached from
other users doing the same :)

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spyder
I quickly made a bookmarklet to robotize HN usernames:

    
    
      javascript:(document.body.innerHTML=document.body.innerHTML.replace(/<a href="user\?id=([^"]+)">([^<]+)<\/a>/g,'<a href="user?id=$1"><img src="http://robohash.org/$2?size=24x24">$2</a>'))()

------
ayanb
The Html source has a random robot as part of the author signature. This is
neat!

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wicknicks
Wow! Very nice morning treat :-)

R2D2 and C3P0 look like this:

<http://robohash.org/c3p0.png> <http://robohash.org/r2d2.png>

C3P0's got horns!!

~~~
e1ven
I'm surprised no one's posted anything from set2 or set3, or included any
backgrounds ;)

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vog
I find it pretty clever to generate Robot faces rather than whole robots or
other pictures. Human brains are optimized for face recognition, which is why
we can tell even minor differences in faces far easier than minor differences
in other pictures.

Therefore, generating human faces would serve this purpose even better, but
those are at risk of falling into the uncanny valley.
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley>)

Using clearly non-human faces (such as Robot faces) avoids that problem.

------
aquark
This is brilliant.

We have a stress testing tool that uses little images of various robots in its
UI to represent different test patterns ... now I can automate them!

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capnrefsmmat
What sort of "Super-Awesome new forum" is this for?

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gus_massa
It has a problem with the current and parent directory links. (I don't know if
it's possible to fix.)

<http://robohash.org/>. (doesn't work)

<http://robohash.org/.>. (doesn't work)

<http://robohash.org/..>. (does work!)

------
Luc
Very very nice. This has convinced me to use this technique for non-player
characters in a game I am working on. I see you licensed the artwork from
three artists. Did you have it especially drawn for you, or was it already
released under some CC license?

~~~
e1ven
I had it drawn for the project at 99designs.

~~~
gokhan
What was your design brief for this? The results are so cool, so should the
brief.

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tomatohs
An easy way to flip the images left and right would be great. I love the first
set of robots, but I wouldn't use them in my website as they'd be placed on
the far left of the browser window, looking away from the page.

~~~
JoshRu
you could always use css: <http://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/flip-an-image/>

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carbocation
If/when you debut the [robohash] watermark in the image, it would be great if
you would also debut a paid plan without the watermark. Plus, paid plans give
people confidence that your service will continue to exist.

~~~
e1ven
I think it would be pretty silly to add a paid plan to a weekend project. ;)

I'll only do that, with the watermark, if it goes over what my bottom-rung
Linode+CDN can deliver.

~~~
melvinmt
It's not silly for people who are actually using this. I'd rather pay for the
service than living with the uncertainty of getting a banner because you can't
pay your CDN bills. That's really the only thing that prohibits me from using
this service in anything useful anyway. It looks very nice so that clearly
would be a waste.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
Download the source from github !

------
nawariata

        Dr. Chandra, RobotCrunch
    

Subtle jab at Arrington? =)

~~~
e1ven
The Testimonials, and the hover-text on the robots change on every reload. Try
it! Hammer the site more ;)

------
jjclarkson
The similarity between <http://robohash.org/yes>

and <http://robohash.org/no>

is striking.

~~~
w43l
there's something wrong with the algorithm, the yes guy looks like he's saying
no

------
rhdoenges
I love some of the alt-text on the robots. Very polished.

~~~
e1ven
That was my favorite part. There are a few fun bits scattered around the
webpage.

~~~
rhdoenges
also the robots in the source code!

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jonovos
Strange. No matter WHAT STRING I ENTER, it ALWAYS creates the SAME robot. Is
this site just a psychological experiment designed to collect user names??

~~~
e1ven
Were you in Firefox, by chance? There was a difference in the FF evaluates the
JS, versus Webkit, when retrieving document.form, so I switched it to
getelementbyid.

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cappaert
Anyone else notice the Microsoft bot has a 7 (as in Windows 7) on its head?

<http://robohash.org/microsoft>

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melipone
I like it but shouldn't it do similarity instead of producing a unique bot?
For example, "similar" strings should produce similar bots.

~~~
e1ven
I'm generating the bots by reading the bits from a SHA1 hash, so they won't be
very similar on an english-text level.

------
cwe
Sad to see Bender in this state: <http://static1.robohash.com/bender>

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wbhart
If I put a % anywhere in the string (except at the end where I think it is
ignored) it doesn't give me my robot, but a broken link!

~~~
e1ven
It's doing a URL decode to store them. I think that a % is not valid in a
URL..

From <http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/4_URI_Recommentations.html->

The percent sign ("%", ASCII 25 hex) is used as the escape character in the
encoding scheme and is never allowed for anything else.

I'll try to see why it's not converting it after work.

~~~
alttag
Same problem with a string of just spaces. It seems the string being hashed
isn't URL-encoded first.

------
andrewcooke
this is cute. if anyone is looking for a more abstract approach i threw some
code together a year ago that generates colourful "mosaics" -
<http://www.acooke.org/hash-icons.html> (i really need to improve the page and
release the code...)

~~~
e1ven
I love the mosiacs; They remind me of a prettier version of identicons.

My concern was just that people won't remember a random pattern of dots very
well.

~~~
andrewcooke
yeah, i agree. on the other hand, they go smaller - i was looking for
something that would label users on a feed of short comments.

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LXicon
if you go to <http://static1.robohash.com/> you get the same page as
<http://robohash.org/> but the IP used is not my IP.

nice project though. :)

~~~
e1ven
Static1.robohash.com goes through the CDN.. If you load a PNG through there,
it's cached. I wouldn't do the whole site through there, though, or you'll get
the CDN's IP!

~~~
LXicon
i figured it was something like that but i felt i should mention it just in
case.

your concept did a good job in alerting me that the IP that was supposed to me
mine was not :)

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tibbon
Any open/permissive license on the output and/or code?

~~~
e1ven
CC BY 3.0 on the Images, BSD on the code.

~~~
billpg
Who should I attribute as the creator of the robot images? You, the website,
or the author of the hashed plain-text?

~~~
e1ven
Just attribute it to RoboHash.org, that should be fine.

