pixels
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Visualized: Douglas Coupland's pixel orca
Douglas Coupland (yes, that Douglas Coupland) created this pixel sculpture which lives outside of the Vancouver convention center. He should meet these guys.
Pixel casting machine creates pixelated vases for our pixelated flowers
We're going to give it to you straight: if we had the room for this beast, we'd totally kill for one. It's a pixel casting machine, meaning that it creates beautiful, pixelated ceramics -- like the ones you made in grade school, only way, way more awesome. Hit up the source link for creator Julian Bond's website where you can see many more photos.
Shawn Smith brings 8-bit art into three dimensions, one tiny block of wood at a time
Austin, Texas-based artist Shawn Smith creates sculptures of things like vultures, sharks and hats on fire, and they're seriously awesome, 8-bit style extravaganzas. The pieces are largely created out of small blocks of wood, and then painted. Hit the source (the artist's website) to see many, many examples of his stunning and beautiful work.
Russell Kirsch helped create square pixels, now he wants to kill them off
Did you know that we're only 53 years removed from the very first digital image? I know, with everyone on your street having a good 2GB of Facebook-uploaded, privacy-be-damned photos, it all seems so pedestrian, so typical. But back in the monochromatic 1950s, when Marlon Brando and Elvis were still young whippersnappers and the UK was busy crowning a new Queen, Russell Kirsch became the first man to create a digital picture, by scanning in a photo of his baby son. Now, half a century wiser, Russell is back to apologize for introducing that cursed square pixel into our lives, and to try to remedy all the jagged little edges we've been seeing on our screens ever since. According to old Rus, squares were just the logical solution at the time, but now that we can splash bits and bytes around with reckless abandon, he's come up with a new algorithm to smooth images beyond what's possible with simple squares. His new idea inserts 6 x 6 masks where there once was just one pixel, with adaptive calculations making for a more realistic representation of the underlying optical data. The sample above shows what improvements this new technique can deliver, with Russell's son doing the posing once more -- you'll find his decidedly younger visage in the 176 x 176 proto-pic after the break.
iPhone 4's retina display claim put under the math microscope
Samsung might have entertained us with some trash talk about the iPhone 4's IPS LCD yesterday, but this stuff is of a rather more somber variety. Raymond Soneira, president of monitor diagnostics firm DisplayMate, has said that Apple's retina display marketing is inaccurate, because he believes a display that truly makes pixels indistinguishable to the human eye would require a density in the vicinity of 477dpi. The iPhone 4 has 326dpi, and by now you might be surmising that Steve Jobs flat out lied when he said that the iPhone 4's pixels are too small for the human retina to discern from 12 inches away. But not so fast, says Phil Plait from Discover, whose résumé includes calibrating a camera on board the Hubble space telescope. He's done the math too and finds that the 477 number applies only to people with perfect vision. For the vast majority of us, Steve's claim stands up to scrutiny; even folks with 20/20 eyesight wouldn't be able to tell where one pixel ends and another begins. So it turns out Apple can do its math, even if its marketing isn't true for every single humanoid on the planet.
'Pixels' short film imagines the coolest apocalypse ever
We're totally expecting December 20, 2012 to come and go without bringing about the end of existence as we know it -- but should the end of days actually befall us, we think we'd want it to look like Patrick Jean's latest short film, "Pixels." There's something about the prospect of everyone and everything turning into glossy, multicolored cubes that really tickles our fancy more than a bevy of natural disasters or aggressive, bureaucratic aliens ever could. Check out the two-and-a-half-minute film after the jump.
Ghostbusters PS3 patch is close to 720p, but no cigar
We were moved -- genuinely moved! -- by Terminal Reality's efforts to improve the lackluster visual quality of the PS3 version of Ghostbusters with a recent patch. However, while the implementation of multi-sampling anti-aliasing and a slight bump of resolution make the PS3 title look prettier than its launch iteration, a recent Digital Foundry comparison came to a startling conclusion. Even post-patch, the game fails to deliver on its promise of 720p resolution or equality with the 360 version of Ghostbusters. The Eurogamer-hosted blog has a few enormous image comparisons for the pixel-counters among you. We're not experts on visual fidelity (What's an alias? Why must it be anti'ed?) but we do know that we are owed. Does one penny per missing pixel sound fair to you?
From Software's 3D Dot Game Heroes does pixel art PS3-style
From Software's latest PS3 game takes 8-bit sprites and mostly updates them for the current generation, with amazing results. 3D Dot Game Heroes takes place in a classic RPG kingdom whose king, following the successful defeat of a demon lord, declares that the world should be 3D from now on. In the process, something goes wrong, though we don't know what yet, and solving that crisis is the basis of the gameplay. We've captured the screens from the rotating display on the official website and subsequently have been staring at them all morning. The game's super high-resolution rendering of 3D pixel art is striking. There's even a tilt-shift effect on the images to make everything look miniature. 3D Dot Game Heroes will be out in Japan in November. %Gallery-70578% [Thanks, Jason]
Pixel jewels not made of real jewels, still likely unaffordable
It's not every day you see fine jewelry that looks this... blurry. Stolen Jewels are the creation of Mike and Maaike, who did a Google for low-resolution images of various famous, priceless pieces of jewelry -- such as a ruby and diamond necklace made by Van Cleef and Arpels for Imelda Marcos -- and then made them even lower-res before transferring them to leather. The result is what you see above: stunning, and arguably much, much preferable to their original, heavy counterparts. There's one more photo after the break -- hit the read link for the whole, beautiful line.[Via Neu Black]
Get 8-bit on your fridge with Magnetic Pixels
A cute idea for homes without small children, the Magnetic Pixels box comes with 1400 10mmx10mm colored magnetic "pixels" from Kikkerland for $30 (or buy directly from the creator). In the right hands, we can imagine some inspired 8-bit art covering those blank white canvasses known as refrigerators.Here's actually where we could use your help: Is there a repository of 8-bit character design? Like, you see that piece of graph paper in the picture? Is there something like that on a website somewhere for people to easily fill in cubes with colors and save for easy reference? There's Favicon.cc, which works well and has a search, but isn't ideal. We're talking something super simple, please don't mention complex apps. Otherwise, we'll have to come up with our own idea on how to fix this inspiration issue, cause lord knows -- especially by looking at our photochops -- we don't have an artistic bone in our barely literate bodies.[Via OhGizmo]
Super Street Fighter II HD looks slightly less appealing, to some
Maybe it's just us but Super Street Fighter II HD Remix looks hella pretty. Pretty perfect, actually. Unfortunately some videophiles may not agree as news has come out that SSFIIHDR upscales in-game character sprites and crops backgrounds when played in 16:9 wide screen. According to notorious pixel counters Digital Foundry, SSFIIHDR is scaling characters and cropping backgrounds because the game was developed to be played old school, that is to say using 4:3 aspect ratio. While we like our games pretty we just don't see enough issue and it becomes even less apparent while you're playing the game. Videophiles have a right to know, though. [via GamersGlobal]
More pixel counting: Haze runs at 576p
It appears that many games this generation aren't meeting the 1080p HD standard that Sony set on PS3. Heck, many games aren't meeting the standard 720p HD resolution, either. For example, Grand Theft Auto IV runs at 640p on PS3. While these kind of shortcomings don't impact the overall visual fidelity, many gamers are still up in arms about these missing pixels.Haze is the next game to fall under the careful watch of videophiles. The recently released demo, when scrutinized, is shown to be running at 576p. Free Radical's Derek Littlewood confirmed to Ripten that the final game also runs in a lower resolution. "That's where we ended up with for Haze ... but I don't understand why people care whether there's 20 pixels, 50 pixels, or 100 pixels more."Other games, like Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3 on Xbox 360, have used lower resolutions to improve overall visual effects. It should be up to every gamer to decide, with their own eyes, whether or not the lowered resolution has created a diminished visual experience for Haze.[Via Digg]
Does your iPhone have dead or stuck pixels?
Dr. Macenstein suggests that now is the time to act. He writes (and he is a he, right--it's not a Frau Doctor Macenstein?) that Apple Store Genius say there's currently no official stuck pixel policy for iPhones (while there are official policies in place for monitors and laptops). If your iPhone suffers from a bad pixel or two, you'll want to bring yours in and get a replacement asap, i.e. before an official policy rears its ugly head. The article tells you how to check your iPhone for pixel problems by adjusting your iPhone display brightness.
Innovation Lab busts out pixel-infused concrete display
Companies have been lighting up (and drawing attention to) simple brick walls for some time now, and while hitting up a game of Tetris is indeed novel, we're thinking the real profit resides in lightweight screens we use in front projection. This rock-hard display consists of not-so-average concrete with "embedded optical fibers, arranged as pixels, capable of transmitting natural as well as artificial light." When light is projected from the rear, the pixels illuminate to display imagery, which could certainly transform a vanilla office building into an ad-filled poster board. While we're not sure when we can expect these things to start popping up around here, Innovation Lab claims that orders are already backing up, and of course, there's always the live action video after the break to tide you over for now....[Via We Make Money Not Art, thanks Naser A]
Apple patent embeds thousands of cameras among LCD pixels
Oh Barry Fox, does a week ever go by when you don't find a great patent or two? Today the intrepid Mr. Fox manages to dig up an application by consumer-darling Apple for an LCD display embedded with thousands of microscopic image sensors that would allow users to video-conference while looking straight into the "camera." Data accumulated by the individual sensors would be stitched into actual images using special software, which will probably be bundled into future versions of iLife. Since the patent specifies almost as many sensors per screen as there are pixels, some of those sensors could have different focal lengths, with a defacto zoom lens created by switching between them. Apple goes on to suggest portable uses for the technology, such as employing the displays in cellphones and PDAs, so you can add another item to the list of features we'll be expecting from the iPhone and Newton 2.0 when they finally hit stores.[Via New Scientist]
Pixel noise said to create unique camera "fingerprint"
Researchers at Binghamton University in New York have filed for a patent on a method of extracting unique identifying information from digital photos, based on pixel noise. According to the researchers, each camera generates its own digital "fingerprint" based on random variables that occur in the manufacturing process. By comparing multiple images from a single camera, the researchers say they can trace the images back to the specific camera that took the photos. The developers see potential for the method in law enforcement activities, such as tracking down child pornographers and forgers. We hope they're right; certainly, any tools they can use are worth exploring. However, we can't help but wonder whether clever criminals will just be able to run a few Photoshop filters and be able to wipe out any trace of their cam's fingerprint before uploading their pics. [Via Ars Technica]
