Nintendo DS cameras are the best lo-fi photo trend

Here is one I took with the Ego

https://gen5.info/$/6-*XERJ0LO3S1GNQP/

For a long time my photography has been secondary to printing things onto cards, that is an 8.5x11 card with a QR code on the back, if you scan it you go to that page. I have a bunch of cardboard anaglyph glasses so of course I give one out when I give out an anaglyph card.

Lately I've been getting into "straight-to-web" publishing again since I find my photos do really well on Mastodon.

The best way to view 3DS pictures is as “wiggle pics”: an animated GIF that toggles between the two frames. They rule.

I've definitely been interested in publishing images in multiple formats.

Right now I make the anaglyph images in Python and print the same image I publish to the web.

I've developed a system to do color management for the printer before I do the anaglyph blending which gives better stereo separation than the other way around. I also discovered I get more consistent results publishing photos to the web if I attach a Display P3 color profile. These changes are going to go into the system before I do my next stereography project.

What I'd like to do is have the web application use WebGL or WebGPU to do the anaglyph processing because that is totally a job for a shader. WebGPU has the advantage that I can specify the color profile which is necessary to get good separation on my AdobeRGB monitor. I'm a Firefox partisan however, and I'm not excited to implement a Chrome-only standard. If I'm doing the anaglyph processing on the client though I could give the user the choice of cross-eyed vision and other variants.

What I'd really like to do is publish stereo images that can be viewed on AR and VR headsets. 3D monitors have been around a long time so really you ought to be able to just publish a stereo image to the web... like that. I think making it work for real though is going to involve WebXR, some Apple Fu or both. Note the back of the cards look like

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110662093661611559

and when I make an installation of the cards I put a QR code next to it

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110817619887893867

Right now the experience I have for that is pretty lame, it lets people flip over the cards kinda-sorta and see the back but that system needs to be reworked, not least that it doesn't really work for the large 13x19 cards that are most of my recent output

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110607498804590869

It's obvious to me that you should scan that QR code with a phone and get an appropriate experience, but you should also be able to scan it with an Apple Vision and get an experience appropriate for that and of course that would involve a stereogram, a light field image, or something like that.

I loved how I could take out my DS at lunch in highschool and connect directly to another person across the room to play Mario Kart, no network required.

Probably figured out a way to cram maximum telemetry/analytics/surveillance and make advertising pervasicenin those devices

Also, they fix a lot of the issues that early game consoles had.

For example, affine texture mapping and the pixel popping that really gave the PSX its distinct flavor is completely gone from modern games that try to emulate it. Or the SNESes texture warping in mode 7. Or the N64s very monotonous textures (or essentially black and white video due to compression).

If a game really tried to replicate the PSX or N64, I don't think people would like the result. Modern sensibilities appreciate the idealized aesthetics, but not the rough edges.

And it makes it easier for the environment to be more interactive/destructible

I'm not convinced past popularity necessarily equates to nostalgia, but as this case demonstrates I may be wrong.

Eh, I’ve thought a few times that if the internet were slower I might be on it less and if I were on it less I might be happier. Not only that but people wouldn’t expect instant replies 24/7, less anxiety about going out without a connected phone, less advertisements, less tracking. I could go on.

Fast broad band everywhere = eternal instant gratification and over connection.

There. Now you’ve seen everything.

> I have yet to see someone romanticize 90s dial-up loading times.

You can get them in DE. For some reason, Vodafone at least, jumped from Edge to 4G, skipping HSDPA. And because they have 99% coverage, in some regions you get Edge, in some, 4G.

There is an active homebrew community making everything from video players to emulators.

I was in my 20s then and owned a “real” digital camera, but I loved how lofi the DSi camera was, so I used it as my EDC basically until a few years after I got an iPhone. It was low res and crap at the time, but low res is cool!

The point is that even by 2010 standards the DSi camera was utter garbage, with no-name webcams on cheap netbooks being better.

It's not that the best digital camera would be miles better than the DSi, it's that a bad digital camera from the previous decade would be miles better than it. Therefore, hardly representative.

100 gecs is too loud for people, lol

I pulled out my New 3DS XL to play Professor Layton DS games to satisfy my puzzle itch. Game designers seemed to understand the format so well, especially for slower thinking games. Taking notes on the screen with the stylus helps with the puzzles, something I haven't see reproduced on the Switch or phone. The 3/DS may be the last truly different game console we'll ever have. The only way I could see it topped is if Nintendo finally stops teasing us and makes a VR-only console.

The real secret of the DSi XL is that it is the only model guaranteed to have two IPS screens, which not even the New 3DS XL is 100 percent on.

Ah, I was wondering if the Japanese version would suffice since they seem to sell at a discount to the US version. Thanks.

Why is it bad to recommend something else they may like?

Not with that attitude you can't.

i don't think this qualifies as "culture" in a meaningful way - technically it is of course part of culture as pretty much anything is.

why am i even complaining, duh? well, because it seems there is more of "culture" like this popping up during the past whatever years. i don't exactly want to blame anybody. i think it is an expression of a perceived void and arbitrariness people try to fight by attempting to manufacture meaning. i suppose it just doesn't work that way. to be even more blunt this appears to me about as culturally relevant as some vintage tiktok filter (not even sure that exists but i guess you get my point).

i get your point but what's missing is a motivation to use this lo-fi tech beyond it being lo-fi for the sake of the pole flip.

There's been a pretty robust rom-hacking community for Super Mario World that dates back to the 2000s, and it's something I always thought was really cool. It's led to some really awesome games coming out that are far more interesting to me being that they're built off an antiquated engine that ran on a 16-bit console from the 90's. There were plenty of other custom Mario level programs out there, like Super Mario Bros X which was an engine entirely made from scratch for PC. But that never interested me nearly as much, because people were writing Lua scripts that could do anything, and could leverage modern PC processing power. I thought it was way cooler to see what people pulled off when having to deal with sprite limitations, and having to write all the code in assembly. It really bred a whole other layer of creativity.

Plus a lot of the games could actually be played on a physic console if you loaded the ROM onto a SNES flash cart.

Typewriters... Oh if I could get my hands on a working selectrix and years of supply of ink and spare parts for less than the price of a kidney I'd be using it all the time, pages would fly and neighbours would whine. It would probably make me more happy than 90% of my 'stuff'. Some things felt better before, and I can understand the sadness of not seeing more (in my case) mass-produced electromechanic tech today or that they haven't survived, at least in affordable form.

It's not unpopular, though. Seems we're only now exiting a decade of nostalgic '80s movie reboots and comic book superheros dominating. Even Nissan decided to remake the ugly '80s Z design. I'm tired of people living in the past, especially when it's an era of design that didn't age well. There's appreciating history, and then there's constantly trying to relive it.

And sure, vinyl records and instant film cameras are timeless fun every once in a while. Litmus test: even people who didn't grow up with them enjoy them. I'd set up a phonograph for a Christmas party. Low-quality digital camera, nah.