Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/11/this-curious-crystal-converts-the-real-world-into-8-bit.html
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I love it.
It sells for ¥ 19,800 (approx US$120).
I don’t love it any more.
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8-bit isn’t about large pixels, it’s about quantizing the colors down to a palette of 256 entries or less. It doesn’t look like the crystal does that.
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once there are enough crystals, the entire world will be quantized into an 8 bit palette automatically. well. enough crystals and the blood sacrifice. but don’t worry, it’ll get there
( edited for clarity 
)
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No fun crystal for you!
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Man, I know someone I’d love to get one of these for as a gift, but I don’t see how to get it in the US. 
Very cool, though. 
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I dunno. It’s handmade, and more clever than a lot of crap at the same price out there. I’d rather support the artist than the inevitable dripship knockoff crap we’ll see on Etsy next week.
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I suspect that this would not be something amenable to handmaking; but I am very curious whether there’s anything in the Journal of Nonlinear Optics and Thin Films are Clearly Witchcraft With Harder Math that could be adapted to create such a remapping.
Looks like you can get up to pentaband bandpass filters as off-the-shelf(but not inexpensive) items; not sure if that’s something that can be scaled up; and also not sure if it would be sufficient given all the “lol, you fell for that lie about color being a relatively well behaved frequency” stuff that comes up in considerations of color theory.
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So that quantizes the hue and saturation, now we need a way to quantize the lightness.
Paging @Flossaluzitarin to reply to this, since my wits are clearly not nonlinear enough. 
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I’m not sure where you’d even start for brightness. On a single-photon scale being picky about wavelength(which definitely can do) starts to shade into being picky about energy, but if there’s a way you could could scale that to help you with bulk photons(especially if you didn’t want to completely constrain the supported colors; but even if you were OK with that) I have no idea what it would be.
There are materials whose transparency is modified by photochemical or thermal effects, like self-darkening sunglasses; but even if you are OK with the refresh rate that’s not quantizing, just throwing a variable amount of attenuation at the incoming analog signal and getting a less intense analog result.
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Was thinking about wavelength, then noticed your icon here is purple, which is cool cuz there are no purple photons.
Brightness is all about quantity of photons. So I guess if you filter for energy instantaneously, you get wavelength, then you filter energy over time to get brightness.
Self-darkening sunglasses is a good idea; maybe a stack of carefully tuned layers would do the job.
Please describe the colours in the spectrum between indigo and ultra-violet.
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Their site: “inventory without”. So, they are not yet available or none are in stock. Also, payment is made via “bank transfer”! The jigoku with that!
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Ok, you got me. I was focused on how computers produce purple, and ignored how real purple photons can trigger the red cones.
I would think a full window made like that would be cool though maybe a bit pricey.
I thought this could be referring to :
… where purple is considered to not be included within the spectral bounds of infra-red ↔ ultra-violet, but is concocted by the brain to reconcile the circular space that having three color receptors implies. (i.e. it has properties of single frequency light (at least perceptually), but no one frequency produces it - as though there was a pure tone that wraps around from the lowest note to the highest in sound)
First recall encountering the idea in the book Elemental Mind by Nick Herbert.
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That idea was indeed my source, but in researching it turned out to be incomplete. I’ll just paste my response to that video cuz why not:
Good start, but you’re missing the fact that there are purple photons. The theory is that at the blue end of the spectrum, there are photons where the wavelength triggers blue cones, while a harmonic of the wavelength (specifically 2x the wavelength) triggers the red cones. You need a real rainbow in a controlled setting to see it, because camera sensors and film don’t respond the same way, so pictures usually don’t show it.
That then begs the question: What happens when add extra red? Does it become “more purple”? Because that would truly be an unreal color.
Edit: I guess the answer to that last bit is yes, it’s magenta.
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