GameBoyCamera
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This guy attached a telephoto lens to his Game Boy Camera
Nintendo launched the wonderfully weird Game Boy Camera for its beloved handheld console in the late 1990s. It attached like a cartridge and allowed people to capture, edit and, if you had the companion hardware, print blocky images on thermal paper. These days, of course, the camera is out of production, but that hasn't stopped a small community from modifying and shooting with the tiny contraption. Designer Bastiaan Ekeler, for instance, has built a Canon lens adapter which supports a comically large (by comparison, anyway) telephoto lens. The result is a new, whimsical way of shooting landscapes and wildlife from afar.
Recommended Reading: Tim Cook on Apple's iPhone X, HomePod and more
Why Apple is the world's most innovative company Robert Safian, Fast Company Apple may be one of the biggest companies in the world, but it still doesn't open up often about how it operates. A few times a year though, we catch a glimpse. Fast Company caught up with CEO Tim Cook back in January to chat Apple's recent run of new gear in an interview that published this week.
Researcher uses Game Boy Camera to capture 2-bit photos of space
The Game Boy Camera, released in 1998, wasn't even close to the weirdest peripheral for Nintendo's classic handheld console and even earned a Guinness World Record for the smallest digital camera in the world. Its 2-bit, 128 x 128 pixel CMOS sensor managed very grainy black-and-white shots, making it far more fun than technically impressive. And yet, a Dutch researcher and tinkerer just used one to catch some charmingly blocky photos of the moon and Jupiter.
AI turns Game Boy Camera photos into decent shots
Many people have fond memories of using the Game Boy Camera, but to call its low-resolution black-and-white shots "photos" would be... generous. Don't tell that to Roland Meertens, though. He recently devised a neural network that turns Game Boy Camera images into more presentable pictures. He trained the AI to clean up, colorize and fill in details for images by feeding it thousands of photos reduced to Game Boy-level image quality. The results aren't exactly good enough to frame for posterity, but they're far easier on the eyes.
Game Boy camera gun prints when you shoot
If you had a spare Game Boy Camera and the printer to match, what would you do with them? If you're media artist Dmitry Morozov, you'd make a one-of-a-kind firearm. His GBG-8 gun uses Nintendo's photographic peripherals and an Arduino board to shoot photos (almost literally) and print them on the spot -- effectively, it's a low-resolution Polaroid cam with a trigger. We can't imagine that this would go down well with security officials, but it could be a blast if you want to capture 8-bit memories with more flair than the original Game Boy gear allows. Let's just hope that Morozov offers some instructions so that his picture pistol is easy to reproduce at home.
Mod turns your graphing calculator into a selfie camera
Your graphing calculator may not be getting much use these days now that other mobile devices can do the job, but it still has a few tricks up its sleeve if you're willing to do some tinkering. Christopher Mitchell's latest project, ArTICam, lets you turn a TI-83 Plus or TI-84 Plus calculator into a selfie-oriented camera. The mod mostly requires a Game Boy Camera and a programmable Arduino board like the Uno. After a little bit of wiring and some (thankfully ready-made) code, you can snap self-portraits with a calculator command. The 128 x 123 grayscale pictures you take won't win photography awards, but that's not the point -- this is more about having fun with gadgets that might otherwise sit in the closet gathering dust. Hit the source link if you have the gear and want to give ArTICam a whirl. [Thanks, Christopher]
