Creating mosaic/tiled image effect with jquery

Question

Is there a way to create the effect shown here on msi.com main image? Though done in flash, I'd prefer doing it with jquery. I've also tried with 'mosaic generators', but haven't been able to replicate the effect well, but use of a generator with js would be acceptable too.

[edit] I failed to mention, I'm only interested in emulated the tiled/mosaic aspect of the effect, not animation. I'd like a large image (e.g. 400px by 300px) separated by whitespace (or color customizable borders) into 9 equally sized blocks or tiles each.

While I would like to apply a individual hover effect to each image, giving each the effect they are separate entities, I don't necessarily need any further animation.

Rounded corners aren't important or wanted. [/edit]

Answer 1

It would be pretty interesting to do it with jquery. You'd have a table of images, each with a hover event that toggled an animation when mousing on and off. The logic isn't too hard; getting the images and the animation to look nice would be a little harder, but not undoable. It depends on how closely you want to replicate the effect. :D

edit: you just want a mosaic of images? you can just use a table to position all of the images, and use js for the events. What else do you want or need js for? :D

Answer 2

Here's an idea. Load a large image into a DIV. Decide on the size of your windows and create a PNG with transparency where you'd like the windows to be. (Opaque at the borders with thickness to control how wide you'd like the whitespace.) To create the effect, use three layers. The image at the bottom layer (which you can swap out as needed). The middle and top layer will be repeated along the x and y axises and controlled individually by jQuery. The middle layer will have the PNG with transparency and on top of that, the top layer with just a solid color (matching your page's background to "seem" invisible?). To create any "pretty" effects, you can adjust the opacity or animate the top layer of the separate boxes to show/hide the image on the bottom layer which will be visible through the middle layer's transparent area in the PNG.

Hope my explanation was clear. With some smart coding, this can be packaged and reused anywhere you'd like.