Auto Generated Avatars on Stack Overflow

Question

Possible Duplicate of

How do you generate that default avatar in Stackoverflow?

Is there a name for the type of geometric based unique avatars that are generated for users of Stack Overflow? I'm interested in the method for generating the patterns and if this is a area of study out side of Gravatars.

Answer 1

I think they are called Identicons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identicon

Snippet from Wikipedia:

An Identicon is a visual representation of a hash value, usually of the IP address, serving to identify a user of a computer system. The original Identicon is a 9-block graphic, which has been extended to other graphic forms by third parties some of whom have used MD5 instead of the IP address as the identifier.

Answer 2

They are known as Identicons

Answer 3

They're called Identicons.

Jeff Atwood pulled together the SO implementation I believe for ASP.NET

Wiki Page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identicon

Jeffs Blog http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000774.html

.NET Implementation http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/files/Identicon-sample-vs-2005-v13.zip

Answer 4

There's a creative commons script you can look at that generates random avatars. It generates little monsters rather than the geometric designs, but it's the same idea. You use the IP or email address of the visitor as the seed:

http://www.splitbrain.org/projects/monsterid

I used this script to teach me how to make a cool one of my own.