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Crystal Fragment Turns Everything You See into 8-Bit Pixel Art
- msephton 2y agoNote: there are two products shown in this article... 1. Pixel Window (not yet available to buy at the time of writing) 2. Pixel Mirror (a smaller version that is on sale at <https://monoli.easy-myshop.jp https://monoli.easy-myshop.jp>) I'm not related to the seller, but thought this info would clarify some things.
- karmakaze 2y agoI can see how it works in one of the links you can see that there's 2 faceted almost half cylinders attached together with a 90' twist so you get quantized (in space, not color value) sampling on each x/y axis.
- kelseyfrog 2y agoHypothetically, how would one construct a crystal which quantized color?
- rbanffy 2y agoI was thinking just that - I’d imagine it’d need to filter light to excite something that’d emit light at the wavelengths you want. It’s, as you noticed, a much more interesting problem. Or emit white light when excited by a filtered wavelength which you’d filter again to get the color you want. With this second one you could do arbitrary palettes such as the Commodore 64 one.
- flir 2y agoNot exactly a crystal, but a quick google tells me trichroic prisms exist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichroic_prism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichroic_prism). Once you've separated out RGB, could you quantize them and recombine them?
- kaba0 2y agoWell, “color” is fundamentally an electromagnetic spectrum. You can’t describe it by 3 values, as it might have an arbitrary shape. What it does is separate out the whole spectrum/graph into 3 graphs that overlap, and summing them up would roughly be the original. But neither of them is quantized this way, the R is not a single value, but still is a spectrum. It’s a human sensory “feature” that certain graphs can be substituted by more standard ones that can be represented by a single number, e.g. a red LED’s spectrum between a certain range might combine well with a green and blue’s given spectrum, so that the combined graph looks similar to the original to us. Nonetheless, we have “compressed” the original and lost data.
- flir 2y agoI have to assume we're aiming for art, not science, here. If someone figures out how to get step changes to a light source with passive components, I'm gonna be impressed. Splitting the light three ways first would just be the icing on the cake.
- _spduchamp 2y agoMaybe a dichromatic film to shift the colours would do the trick as each facet has a slightly different angle.
- 082349872349872 2y agoprev https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40895907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40895907
- msephton 2y agoIf you check the ID you'll see that this was posted first. The timestamp has since been changed due to HN "Second Chance Pool" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
- rbanffy 2y agoIn order to be properly 8-bit it’d also need to round the colours to some quantised palette. The physics of that would be much, much more interesting. I’m guessing that Atari 8-bit computers would be the easiest, followed by pure 8 and 16-colour RGB and RGBi palettes. To do the Commodore 64 palette would be a very interesting materials science project. And then do that with variable ones, like the Commodore 16, where you have an arbitrary subset of a quantised color space. Try that without a power supply.
- Terr_ 2y ago> In order to be properly 8-bit it’d also need to round the colours to some quantised palette. The physics of that would be much, much more interesting. Especially since determining "the color"--even in a huge palette--ia a biologically-bound process, linked to the reaction of cells in primate retinas, as opposed to being a fundamental optical or mathematical operation. Multispectral wavelengths are to colors as chemical-stew is to smells.
- p0w3n3d 2y agofor me it's terrific, colors are another issue. The way it shows the world in pixels would perfectly help in creating pixel art.
- layer8 2y agoOnly modern “retro” pixel art. Classic pixel art depends on how neighboring CRT pixels or LCD subpixels blend with each other.
- rbanffy 2y agoYes, and pixels aren't rectangular, but changes on a scan line. And then let's not go into vectors, because, considering the Vectrex was an 8-bit machine, vector drawings are, by definition, "8-bit".
- kaba0 2y agoResolution and color depth are two different “dimensions”, and 8-bit may refer to either.
- jalk 2y ago> There is no denying that modern graphic resolutions have reached unachievable heights Who thought current resolutions were unachievable?
- viraptor 2y agoThere were articles every few years about some density of transistors being a hard limit. The we crushed it. Then we packed more layers. Then we crushed the new limit again. The resolution was not mentioned, but effectively it would be limited too if the frequencies couldn't go up.
- 55555 2y agoif you like this and you wear jewelry, get yourself a pixel cut gemstone: https://www.instagram.com/p/CYc4X2asex9/ https://www.instagram.com/p/CYc4X2asex9/
- isoprophlex 2y agoHaha that looks like it's been censored
- Paul_S 2y agoMaking pixel art is not about low resolution. AI is finally getting close to being able to do it. If you could do it with a crystal it wouldn't have taken 30 years of trying to automate pixel art creation.
- Paul_S 2y agoBase SDXL can't do it but with some Loras you can get something that after putting through Photoshop to regularise pixels and palette would pass the pixel art Touring test.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]