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.

Comments

Techniques

[Wire Tap]

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!

This is great...

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

snooker robot

[Hieronymus Howard]

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

Old method

[rasty]

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...

Infrared photo... It is kind of cool.

[AtomicBomb]

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..)

IR coolness!

[glebite]

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?

gameboy camera pics

[friscolr]

that's nice and all, but it's not like it's a photo of a supermodel.

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.

Re:gameboy camera pics

[friscolr]

yes i get to respond to my own post!

ten more minutes of searching and i found the site i was thinking of:
Gameboy Camera Parallel Port Interface
website features colour photographs taken using the gameboy camera, though since it didn;t use an ir filter the images appear washed out. Also has a lot of other info about hacking the gameboy camera.

You only really need two components

[yerricde]

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.

Re:You only really need two components

[Uberminky]

You are correct, sir. Cyan is indeed the two colors, blue and green, together.

Whenever I'm making a color stereo anaglyph, I combine the red channel from one image, with the green AND blue channels of another image (effectively copying the cyan channel). This works because the anaglyph glasses have a red filter over the left eye, and a cyan filter over the right.

Get yourself some anaglyph glasses and check out some of my pics:

http://php.indiana.edu/~dgsharp/gallery.html

Or if you don't have any glasses you can see the non-anaglyph stereograms by crossing your eyes. As far as I know, the crappy little gallery I made has the only existing stereo images of The Matrix. :)

1930's Technicolor ®

[cmacd]

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.