Programmer Patrick Gillespie developed, perhaps, the most miniature version of the classical game “Snake”. Instead of the usual graphics, its version of Snake uses separate subpixels of the LCD display, which makes the game almost invisible without … microscope.
Image source: Patrick Gillespie / YouTube
The game, created by Gillespie, is played in a web browser and works according to the same rules as the standard version of Snake, writes Notebookcheck. The user controls a “snake” that absorbs objects and becomes longer with each “eaten” element. The peculiarity of this project is that instead of an image, the movement of the object is displayed on the screen only at the level of subpixels, each of which consists of three parts – red, green and blue.
It is these subpixels, working together, that produce the colors on the screen. However, Gillespie managed to make the game use only one of them, which required a lot of work and significant modification of the program code.
The first difficulties arose with the accuracy of the display. For example, when activating a green subpixel, the light from the monitor illumination partially illuminated the neighboring red subpixel, creating visual artifacts. However, Gillespi solved this problem by switching to a non -standard color space that differs from a well -known and widely used SRGB format.
The result is a game that is impossible to see without a microscope, and despite its absolute impracticality (how to play it?), the project demonstrated the ability to control tiny pixels through writing program code, which is interesting in itself and may have an impact in the future on the development of technology in the field of displaying data on monitors.