I'm a designer, and this got me wondering if it was possible to achieve the same effect using Photshop. Turns out it's actually possible, so I wrote a quick tutorial:

http://www.attackofdesign.com/how-to-build-a-portrait-with-d...

step 2. design 3000 tiny robotic hands to rotate the die in real time to make a dice mirror, finally outdoing Rozin's wooden mirrors.

http://www.smoothware.com/danny/woodenmirror.html

Amazing.

That's cool. I wonder if it might have been improved by applying a Floyd–Steinberg dithering (or some such) first?

For anyone wondering, that's about $200 of dice retail and around $100 wholesale.

Where would you buy this wholesale?

There are similar portraits done with Rubik's Cubes http://freshome.com/2011/11/08/dream-big-rubik%E2%80%99s-cub...

This would be such a great Mindstorms project. If the dice came packaged all in the same orientation, you wouldn't even need the camera sensor.

Wonder what the reverse side looks like. Come to think of it it would be cool to slice the dice, to save weight and numbers.

The opposite sides of a die add up to seven. So the opposite side of the picture just looks like the negative of the image.

I am not following your train of thought. Care to elaborate a little?

If you're looking at a die, and see a 1, the opposite side will be a 6. If you're looking at a 2, the opposite side is a 5, and so on with 3 and 4.

So the back side of that portrait would have sixes in place of ones, and so on - generating a negative, with black taking the place of white, and white taking the place of black.

"It weighs close to 100 pounds." - for that weight, I'll take the girl instead.

But seriously, 2560 dice => 17gram 16mm-size dice. That's very heavy dice for their size. I would have expected less than a quarter that!