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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!
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
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!
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...
... 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.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I don't know what the moderators are thinking. They're about as confused as the posters.
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.
That's it, get the kids into Voyeurism early.
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
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
Username taken, please choose another one.
A red filter has to filter out all wavelengths except for red (green, blue, violet, etc.) but let through red-ish frequencies. Red light goes through virtually unaffected, but orange light is partially blocked, and yellow light a little more so. Green filters have to filter out red and blue, and partially filter out yellow, lime, cyan, etc. This represents two frequency bands, on either side of green, which is in the middle of the visible spectrum. I was just expressing surprise that the wavelengths that are blocked doesn't cover the infra-red, that's all.