The Lens Media Lab closed in 2025. It ran at Yale’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage from its founding in 2015 until 2025, under founder and director Paul Messier. Its collection of more than 7,500 photographic papers, dating from 1890 to 2010, is now held at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and is digitized and discoverable through LUX, Yale’s collection discovery platform. The papers can also be explored in Paperbase, the lab’s own tool for visualizing them by thickness, gloss, roughness and warmth. The full record is on the lab’s page at IPCH.
These are legacy projects. Most were made for fun and for learning, built in 2022–2023 and preserved as part of that record. The pages below still run, but they are not maintained, and the Texturescope Toolbox needs an API server that is no longer deployed.
Projects
Everything here runs in the browser unless noted.
LML Image Processing
Adjust brightness and gamma, apply filters, and split a texture scan into model-ready 64×64 tiles exported as a single zip.
Glyph-O-Matic
Plots texture, gloss, thickness and color on a Cartesian plane, turning four measurements into one comparable shape.
Texture Matching Lite
Match a texture against a reference folder using the Asilomar triplet-loss model, running entirely in your browser. No server needed.
Texturescope Toolbox
The full texture classification tool: upload a collection, attach metadata, and match it against the lab’s reference collection. The matching server is not running, so the interface can be browsed but not used.
Spec Project
Reference notes on USB pinouts, spectrophotometry and the visible spectrum.
Docs & Updates
Documentation, presentations and a running changelog for this work.