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Color Photographs with Game Boy Camera
An anonymous submitter sends in: "For the first time, the Game Boy Camera has been used to take COLOR Photographs. It's the Game Boy Camera Color Photography Project." The previous slashdot story that this reminds you of is this one about digichromatography.
This is similar to the technique used to add color to pictures of Russia, circa 1863-1944. Images can be found at The Library of Congress's website. The link is: (http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/gorskii.html). Enjoy!
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From the site: "with the Game Boy Camera, it's not possible to hand-hold it."
Wow, all the poor-quality, low-resolution pictures you'd expect from a bargain basement digital camera with none of the portability. This guy is going to make millions!
Would the Game Boy Advance be a better platform for this. Is has alot more power , resolutions , colours then the GBC.
Cruise TT
A few years ago (back in the 1980's I think), I saw a science show on british TV, where a group of Ph.D. (graduate) students were building a robot to play snooker. They only had a black and white video camera and needed some way of recognising the colour of the snooker balls. Their solution was to carefully detect the grey level of each ball. I thought at the time that a better solution would be to use 3 filters in this way (perhaps on a rotating wheel in front of the camera), which would have given them colour images from a black and white camera. Can I claim prior art? Maybe I should have patented the idea :-)
HH
Actually, this is a quite old and well-known method of obtaining color images with a non-color camera. The first video digitiser that I got way back for my Amiga came with 3 filters (R, G and B of course). The main problem was holding the camera and subject perfectly still while capturing the 3 separate shots, otherwise you'd get an effect similar to that of a disaligned RGB beamer.
The biggest logical step made by that individual was the application of the IR filter.
What could actually be interesting would be writing a native GameBoy software to both combine the 3 images and correctly align them if the camera slightly moved during the process, which is something really likely with a GB camera. Keep in mind that you'll have to hold the GB *really* still, put filter 1 in front of it, take picture, repeat 3 times...
I just come across a tutorial about near infrared photography. If the gameboy cam are IR sensitive, it will be quite cool. We can even build a "flashnight" with an array of remote control IR LEDs.
Next time I know how to take a close shot of the penguins without waking them up (I live somewhere in south hemisphere, within very long driving distance to a penguin colony..)
Why not attach the gameboy viewscreen to sit in front of one eye and aim the camera forwards, attach some high-output IR LEDs to project out and run as a hacked/cheap nightvision?
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
Welcome to /. ! :-)
All CCD-based cameras are sensitive to IR. For example, if I point my remote controller towards mu AGFA CL20, I can see the IR-leds blink on and off (using a video-software that is.)
... sometimes do the same, i.e., a motorized filter wheel placed in front of the CCD. No realtime acquisition, but very good for static/very slow subjects (i.e., microscope and telescope images). This because single CCDs are more precise/sensitive than 3CCD cameras.
With this technique you may also select other primary colours (i.e., CMY), and filter strange colour combinations.
You may find some picture of such weels for example at http://www.ghg.net/cshaw/filter.htm (applied to telescope observation).
seriously though, i remember seeing a webpage about a guy using his gameboy as a webcam (the aforementioned website, http://www.lunacy8m.com/, does this as well) and he also had colour photos taken with 3 filters. That was at least a few months ago and definitely before October 2001, so it would have been the first. can't seem to find the site anymore, though.
-f
www.blackant.net
It's possible to create reasonably convincing color with only two components: red and cyan. Try it. Turn off your NVIDIA video card's blue gun, or grab an image in GIMP or Photoshop and turn off the blue channel, and see that it affects the image very little (other than giving a yellow cast which can be fixed by copying the green channel into the blue channel). This works because the human eye isn't very sensitive to blue light.
I'm considering using this fact for image compression on a Game Boy Advance homebrew game.
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Prior art? That would be the works of Sergei Produkin-Gorskii, who used filters to create colour images from B&W slides almost 100 years ago. As pointed out in the article, Slashdot has already covered this impressive merit.
The idea that GB camera can do IR is more incredible to me. imagine it, GB night vision! I imagine there'll be someone who read that and is hacking it up as I type this =)
Don't call my crazy, that's what they called me back in the home!
gosh someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed didnt they? What a sad, sad little man you are I got real money that says your that guy who had a go at me when i said the price for vegtable oil price is about 69 cents, who then proceeded to say melbounre pricing is 72, ofcourse, after i refuted his baseless claim by saying its 92 cents here in perth, and melbournes not the center of the world, he shut up what hte hell do you have against me? i know its the same guy. Sigh, i relaly couldnt care actually, go away
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I don't know what the moderators are thinking. They're about as confused as the posters.
I'm kinda surprised it took someone this long to figure this out. Newtek's Digiview did this a long time ago...it would work with any black and white camera.
The thing with the Sony camera was that it emitted an infrared light which was picked up by the camera and allowed some sort of night vision (or X-Ray through thin materials). They later crippled the feature so that it could only be used at night (thus no longer working "X-Ray").
Would this work here? I'm not going to run out and buy one, I'm just curious if it is something specific to infrared and cameras that detect infrared, or if Sony had a special CCD.
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
I've as yet been unable to capture an image of the back of my webcam, and this is broundbreaking on that front... :)
Dude...the gameboy camera sucks. I mean, digichromawhatevertography is cool and all...but the gameboy cam still sucks...
Why can't he concentrate on making a supercool GBA light like this guy?
RED BLUE and GREEN, and cyan, yellow and magenta. are the complements of each other. Cyan looks like "Sky Blue" and magenta looks like a "redish purple"
Cyan is the "opposite" of RED.
Yellow is the "opposite" of BLUE
Magenta is the "opposite" of GREEN
Adding them up you will find that red and green will look Yellow, for example.
Blue and green will look Cyan
Red and green will look Yellow.
Another Wild-Eyed CANADIAN.
The very early Technicolor® process only used two colors, at the time it was hard to get pancromatic film. They shot two strips of film, though color filters and combined them for presentaion.
Another Wild-Eyed CANADIAN.
The CBS colour TV system used a color wheel, to present sequental views through three filters. The principle is still used in France and Russia, (electronicaly) with a system called SECAM
Another Wild-Eyed CANADIAN.
That's it, get the kids into Voyeurism early.
I remember owning the old Digitech (Newtek, Video Toaster, Digipaint 3) camera stuff for the Amiga way back when.
Since color cameras were still prohibitly expensive back then, they gave you a black and white video camera, with three color filters to hold in front of the camera while taking a snapshot. THIS is how you used their product! The program would then combine the color values into a color picture for you.
Old hack, but still neat. I might have to get me one of those Gameboy thingies, what with the digital cameras and plethora of audio sequencing software for it.
The imager in the gameboy camera is a Mitsubishi Electric M64282FP CMOS image sensor (not a CCD). It is slightly more sensitive to near infrared than it is to visible light. The '282 has a resolution of 128x128 pixels, will do 30 frames per second and outputs the pixels in analog format.
You can find more information on hacking this chip and the gameboy camera at http://home.earthlink.net/~apendragn/gbcam/
...does this remind anyone of the good ol' Digiview for the Amiga back in the 80's? It used the exact same process to make color HAM ('Hold And Modify' for the uninitiated) images. I remember being so impressed with the results, especially when one compared it with the B&W Macs of the day, and the 16 color EGA x86 clones.
Here's how the process works. I plan to try it myself in Photoshop.
Many planetary probes don't carry color cameras but instead use high-resolution black and white cameras to shoot three images of the same scene, which are combined to produce those stunning photos that we see on sites like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory site.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Anyone remember NewTek's DigiView Gold?
The mainstay of digitizing for the Amiga back in the late 80's and early 90's consisted of what amounted to a black and white security camera with a color wheel mounted infront of the lens. Not a new development here, kids. Besides that, as someone else pointed out, people have been taking RGB Composite photos for close to 100 years now.
Bowie J. Poag
so with an infrared light source you could take great pictures in what appears to be the dark....interesting.
this sig is deprecated
The first color photographs made using this system were done in 1869, just after the American Civil War. Two men working independantly each discovered it. Later Technicolor movies were made this way also using three color filters with black and white film. In fact modern video camera use red, green and blue filters over every third pixel. and color film uses three layers each senitive to either red, blue or green so the technique is over 130 years old and in wide use today.
Thats just fucking great, what are they going to think of next? COLOR TELEVISIONS? also, I would like to add that the mod aka Michael, is a CUNT.
But how cameras work today in 2001 to get the colors exactly ?
The DigiView was a slow scan digitizer that took a PAL or NTSC signal and turned it into an IFF Amiga image. To get colour, you mounted a filter wheel of Red, Blue and Green filters just like in this Game Boy article. They even had a motorized attachment that went to the Joystick port called a DigiDroid, it was a software cued servo IIRC which rotated the cardboard (or sometimes plexiglass) filter.
You have to remember, for the price of $249 back in 1988, this was a really big deal. It usually came with a Panasonic WV1410 CCTV camera and a copystand...scanners were really much more expensive, like $2500-3000.
Calum
when will you stupid americans realise that the correct spelling is COLOUR
by using COLOR you only make yourselves look stupider than you already are
Before you moderate this up, PLEASE check Angry Black Man's posting history, READ his posts, and check the links in those posts. You'll see that every one of them is an Adequacy-style troll.
Proof that Angry Black Man is a troll:
1. Most of his posts are crafted to look informative but contain gross factual errors that nobody could make inadvertantly.
2. Angry Black Man posted to the old Trolltalk.
3. Angry Black Man often goes for obvious karma-whores early in a story, such as copy-pasting kernel release notes.
4. Angry Black Man often lies about his identity and flat-out makes things up in order to deceive people.
5. Angry Black Man lies about his race -- he is NOT Black, he is a pasty-white Adequacy editor. Black people are not intelligent enough to use computers, so obviously he is not black.
Please send his karma to negro hell.
This process only allows 64 colors (4 reds, 4 greens, 4 blues).
...it's pretty cool to see a bright person work through this engineering problem, especially the IR snag. good job!
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If you look at how the inhabitants of southern Great Britain mangled the language of Chaucer, I think Daniel Webster could be forgiven for chopping off a superfluous 'u', or rearranging the odd 're'. ;-)
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I have the model of the camera that was contriversial... It's nothing at all like you've probably seen. If a girl is wearing a thin shirt you can make out her bra. You can usually do that anyway. YAWN
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Nope...it didn't work. I'm still Jones'in for a Canon E-20.
There ain't no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.
Great! Now that people are dumping broadband, there will be growing demand for low-bandwidth porn. Sure, there's ASCII porn, but that's not in color...
You can't see a Gameboy screen in the dark.
Cheer.s
Cool! Amazing Toys.
inspect http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/~vkemp/gbcam.htm
not only had he tried colour filters, the GB camera (or at least its core component) is attachable to a parallel port. all sorts of info there
http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/~vkemp/gbcam.htm