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Color Photographs with Game Boy Camera 104

Posted by michael from the improvise-adapt-and-overcome dept.
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.
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Color Photographs with Game Boy Camera More

Color Photographs with Game Boy Camera

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  • Techniques (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Wire Tap ( 61370 ) <frisina@NOspAM.atlanticbb.net> on Thursday November 08, 2001 @07:36AM (#2537246)
    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!

    • Re:Techniques (Score:2, Informative)

      by staili ( 200478 )
      Actually that link to digichromatography [slashdot.org] tells also about that same.

  • This is great... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 08, 2001 @07:40AM (#2537257)
    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.

  • snooker robot (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Hieronymus Howard ( 215725 ) on Thursday November 08, 2001 @07:43AM (#2537260)
    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

    • Prior art? That would be the works of Sergei Produkin-Gorskii [loc.gov], 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 [slashdot.org] this impressive merit.

      • Yes, I was joking about prior art. I've seen the work of Sergei Produkin-Gorskii, as I did some research recently into early colour photography. There's some truly amazing stuff out there. If you're interested then check out the Lumière Autochrome process too. It produces absolutely beautiful pictures (See www.autochrome.com)

        HH
    • Your idea is what I would have proposed, too. :) Anyway, they've been doing this stuff forever. It wasn't THAT long ago but they did the same thing with the original b&w QuickCam, among other things. This story got a bit of a yawn out of me, but oh well.

  • Old method (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rasty ( 212471 ) on Thursday November 08, 2001 @07:45AM (#2537263) Homepage
    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...
    • 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

  • Infrared photo... It is kind of cool. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AtomicBomb ( 173897 ) on Thursday November 08, 2001 @07:55AM (#2537273) Homepage
    I just come across a tutorial [echeng.com] 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..)
    • 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/ [earthlink.net]

  • IR coolness! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by glebite ( 206150 ) on Thursday November 08, 2001 @08:02AM (#2537284)

    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?

    • Re:IR coolness! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by nounderscores ( 246517 )
      Good idea, but you'll need something set up to illuminate the viewscreen with, yet not allow any visible light to leak out the sides and give away your position.

    • Re:IR coolness! (Score:2, Informative)

      by uchi ( 534979 )
      The CCD in the Gameboy camera only picks up infrared light which is near visible(red) light - which is approx. 780 nm i believe. The infrared light emitted by humans and animals would not be perceptable by the contraption, I think.

      • Re:IR coolness! (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Perhaps that is why the poster indicated he would use some IR LEDs to *illuminate* the targets with near-visible IR? Or perhaps you just didn't read his entire post.
      • I don't know what the moderators are thinking. They're about as confused as the posters.

    • Re:IR coolness! (Score:2, Informative)

      by Radnor ( 4434 )
      I wonder what kind of picture would come up if you used a Photon micro-light that emitted IR? Here's what their web page [photonlight.com] says about the IR light:

      "Used by members of the Secret Service, this Photon light creates a powerful infrared beam invisible to the naked eye. Rated at 11mW, this little light is quite a bit more powerful than your average IR illuminator. When used in conjunction with night vision equipment, it will illuminate a large area. This Photon light is ONLY useful when used with night vision equipment or other equipment sensitive to infrared light."
      • $25 for an LED? Bah. I spent about 8 bucks on an 87C filter [kodak.com], slapped it on a Mag-Lite, and got about 50 yards' range when viewed through a Sony camcorder with NightShot.
    • You can't see a Gameboy screen in the dark.
      Cheer.s
  • ... 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). [ghg.net]

  • gameboy camera pics (Score:4, Informative)

    by friscolr ( 124774 ) on Thursday November 08, 2001 @08:32AM (#2537334) Homepage
    that's nice and all, but it's not like it's a photo of a supermodel [lunacy8m.com].

    seriously though, i remember seeing a webpage about a guy using his gameboy as a webcam (the aforementioned website, http://www.lunacy8m.com/ [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 (Score:4, Informative)

      by friscolr ( 124774 ) on Thursday November 08, 2001 @08:40AM (#2537364) Homepage
      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 [paradise.net.nz]
      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.

    • I've also got a Gameboy Webcam [optusnet.com.au] that I run irregularly (dial-up connection). I've got one black jumper I wear frequently that comes out white on the camera (and with a heavy blue tint on my old Kodak DC20). After reading the site a few days back I decided I'd try to pickup a "hot mirror" filter to get rid of the IR at my next opportunity, but I did only find the site three days ago (which I suspect was went it was submitted to /.).

  • You only really need two components (Score:5, Interesting)

    by yerricde ( 125198 ) on Thursday November 08, 2001 @08:37AM (#2537352) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • It's possible to create reasonably convincing color with only two components: red and cyan.

      wait a minute, aren't red green blue primary colours, cyan yellow magenta secondary colours, with cyan falling right between blue and green, thus being made up of green and blue. So using only 2 colours, red and cyan, is like using 3 primary colours, red blue and green, but guaranteeing that blue and green will exist in equal quantities.

      but i've always been a it confused about emitted vs. reflected colours, and with light vs. paint, so if anyone can confirm and/or explain more, please do.

      • 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 [indiana.edu]

        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. :)
      • 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.
    • I figured this out when doing color photography with my B&W QuickCam back in 1998:

      Using a standard pair of red-blue 3d glasses, take a red image and a blue image. Subtract these two from the full image to generate the green image, and remix. This method has the advantage of not needing anything fancier than the free 3d glasses that Wendy's was giving away at the time.

    • 1930's Technicolor ® (Score:5, Interesting)

      by cmacd ( 81669 ) on Thursday November 08, 2001 @10:30AM (#2537826) Homepage Journal
      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.
  • While I was succesfully filtering out red, green, and blue light, infrared light was still reaching the lens of the camera.
    A "red" filter should filter out everything except red, likewise "blue" filters filter out everything except bluie, etc. - so how come the infrared was getting through? Okay I know that all filters have limits, for example covering your radio in green cellophane won't stop you getting decent reception. I am surprised that IR was getting through, though.
    • Infrared isn't red as you're thinking. Nothing to do with the color red.

      A red filter will block out all light on the at the wavelength we associate the color red with.

      Infrared is on a whole different wavelength.

      Therefore, a 'red' filter will only filter out those on the red wavelength... which infrared is not.
      • 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.
  • 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 =)
  • 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.
    • My reaction too, but which is older, The DigiView or the guy with the "first color pictures in the world from a GameBoy camera"?

      History was easier to learn when we were kids - there was so much less of it.
  • I don't know the technical details, but thinking about the old Sony camcorder that had "night vision", couldn't this be done on the game boy?


    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.

  • 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? [portablemonopoly.com]

  • ISPY (Score:2, Funny)

    by JustJoking ( 535170 )
    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.
    • It's not just the expense, B&W cameras produce a sharper image than color cameras due to the way they work. In addition to the DigiView, I have this Polaroid image capture device that works the other way - you feed in an RGB or NTSC signal and inside the box is a B&W CRT - no shadow mask for monochrome video - gives it a nice, crisp image. There is a motorized color wheel in front of the CRT and a camera bolted on in front of that (I have both the instant camera and the 35mm camera for it). You preview the scene on a monitor, hit "print" and the circuits inside display each color component of the image on the CRT, move the color wheel and snap the shutter. It advances the film after the film has been exposed to all four color seps.

      I used it to produce some title slides for a presentation I gave at a science-fiction convention. The unit cost me $40 at the Hamvention, film and processing is less than $8 for 35mm slide film. It was cheaper than paying for one set of slides to be cut by a service bureau.
  • ...does this remind anyone of the good ol' Digiview [newtek.com] 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.
  • Digichromatography is often used in applications where color photographs of objects are needed in high detail. This is because black and white film often has a finer grain than color does (I don't know the specifics, though. I invite comments from more avid photographers than I). It is also used, as in this case, at times when color cameras are not available -- for example, prior to World War I [loc.gov].

    Here's how the process works [loc.gov]. 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 [nasa.gov] site.



  • 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.
  • so with an infrared light source you could take great pictures in what appears to be the dark....interesting.
  • But how cameras work today in 2001 to get the colors exactly ?
  • What a cute idea. It reminds me of the NewTek DigiView, one of the most popular products on the Amiga (NewTek went onto to produce the famed VideoToaster card for the Amiga).


    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

  • ...it's pretty cool to see a bright person work through this engineering problem, especially the IR snag. good job!
  • Nope...it didn't work. I'm still Jones'in for a Canon E-20.
  • Great! Now that people are dumping broadband [slashdot.org], there will be growing demand for low-bandwidth porn. Sure, there's ASCII porn, but that's not in color...

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