Circular Pixels to defeat the Square Pixels

[AlexHW]

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[AlexHW]

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[AlexHW]

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[ptoing]

I just watched those 3 videos, despite the fact that I should be sleeping.

Here are some objections:

• Pixels do not have a mind and it is also not workable metaphor in any way.
• Round screens would be a lot less space efficient than Rectangular or square ones.
• Any way you construct a screen you would have to have some regular structure to the pixels, unless they are really organic in a way that they can rearrange themselves in realtime and PHYSICALLY. I don't see that happen anytime soon.
• If you would overlap pixels you would get A LOT of fringing and bleeding and the circularity would not help to make this more controllable.
• Looking at a picture on a screen looks pretty much the same as looking at a photo, you get the same visual input if you are a bit away from the screen. Circular pixels would not improve that in any way.
• What improves clarity is higher DPI. My monitor has a DPI of 92ish, the iDevice retina displays have a DPI of over 300. You can not even see the pixels with your naked eye at all. This advance will come to end user screens with time as well
• To make a pixel you need subpixels unless you want to make a system that can deliver a specific colour to each pixel without the need to be mixed. So how would you arrange your subpixels inside a round pixel without wasting even more space and cause fringing and so on? You could make the subpixels to be thirds and like pieslices. I strongly believe that that would lead to more fringing than it would be worth.
• If I want to look at reality, you know what, I look at reality and not at my screen. I can take a walk and interact with what we call reality.
• At this point it feels to me that you are trolling for attention for whatever reason.

[AlexHW]

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[Friend]

• What improves clarity is higher DPI. My monitor has a DPI of 92ish, the iDevice retina displays have a DPI of over 300. You can not even see the pixels with your naked eye at all. This advance will come to end user screens with time as well

Does this bit foreshadow the impending death of the medium? 

[ptoing]

Sorry, but no. A square is just as real as a circle. You are just playing semantics, really.

And I would like to see you sit down and actually come up with a logical configuration of a pixel matrix for a circular screen and then visualise how that would actually be better at displaying lines or anything really than squares at high DPI counts can. If you would have the same DPI with round vs square pixels i posit that the round screen would have a lot more wobbly looking image, unless you just put the round pixels in a square grid, in which case you would have a darker image with otherwise the same result.

I suggest you actually sit down a bit and think your ideas through instead of just blurting them out once you get them.
At least that is the impression you are making. You made 94 videos since the 23rd of may. That is over 2 videos a day on average. And it does not look like you are getting much if any real feedback on them. If this is somehow a substitute for real human interaction for you then I would suggest to find some friends IRL and hang out with them. Just a suggestion.

[ptoing]

• What improves clarity is higher DPI. My monitor has a DPI of 92ish, the iDevice retina displays have a DPI of over 300. You can not even see the pixels with your naked eye at all. This advance will come to end user screens with time as well

Does this bit foreshadow the impending death of the medium? 

Not really. You can hardly see the pixels on modern screens as compared to stuff that was around 10 or so years ago. people still make pixelart. Pixelart has been and will keep on declining in terms of professional usage for applications. But right now pixel specific knowledge is (and I think will stay to be) important for graphic design in icons and such. Look at the tool icons in Photoshop. They are not really pixelart, have a lot of shades and are very smooth. But they show understanding of pixel level detail, and they have to, because they are quite small. Even if the DPI is 3 times higher you need to make things sharp where it has to be. So this kinda stuff will keep it's value.

As far as games go it will become a style choice and also has to do with ease of production.
And the hobby sector I think will always persist. Just as people still make lowpoly stuff for the fun of it and even more so just as people still make etchings or wood cuts and so on.

[Friend]

• What improves clarity is higher DPI. My monitor has a DPI of 92ish, the iDevice retina displays have a DPI of over 300. You can not even see the pixels with your naked eye at all. This advance will come to end user screens with time as well

Does this bit foreshadow the impending death of the medium? 

Not really. You can hardly see the pixels on modern screens as compared to stuff that was around 10 or so years ago. people still make pixelart. Pixelart has been and will keep on declining in terms of professional usage for applications. But right now pixel specific knowledge is (and I think will stay to be) important for graphic design in icons and such. Look at the tool icons in Photoshop. They are not really pixelart, have a lot of shades and are very smooth. But they show understanding of pixel level detail, and they have to, because they are quite small. Even if the DPI is 3 times higher you need to make things sharp where it has to be. So this kinda stuff will keep it's value.

As far as games go it will become a style choice and also has to do with ease of production.
And the hobby sector I think will always persist. Just as people still make lowpoly stuff for the fun of it and even more so just as people still make etchings or wood cuts and so on.

I like the the true point you made about understanding of pixel level detail and tiny detail will always remain.  But then I asked myself if computers eventually lose the visual pixel, and eventually all old computers will become broken beyond repair, wouldn't *that* kill the medium?  And then I questioned whether or not as long as we have computers, we could always *simulate* old pixel resolutions, just like people today make art in outdated resolutions on new hardware.  Sorry, I'm not really old enough or have had the exposure to computers to know near as much as I should about them...

[ptoing]

I do not see the pixelformat of screens changing anytime soon. It has been around since ages now in terms of computer time. There is no reason to change pixels into anything but square, from a backward compatibility point of view alone. Imagine changing to some quite different format and then viewing old images, or just running Windows 7 on some screen which has a different setup for whatever reason. It would be clusterfuck. That is reason alone not to change anything even if there may be a better solution. Higher DPI is all that is really needed to circumvent the shortcomings of square pixels. So that is the future.

On a sidenote to that. The higher the resolution and DPI will get the closer will we get to emulating old CRT screens in terms of visuals through stuff like pixel shaders. And the higher the res and DPI the closer we get to circumventing the native resolution/fixed aspect problem LCD/OLED screens have.

[Grundy]

If somehow pixelated screens would be replaced by 3D holographics in a space and images would be made out of some kind of laser vector.  we'd get to play with lightcubes ( a format we'd make up ourselves. just for fun) and  pixelart would morph into unlimited lego.

And if that did'nt work for us there'd always be ministeck
I think it's the limitations rather than the possibilities that make the medium interesting. We'll always find some shackling rules for ourselves to play within. Trying to improve on the rules (circular vs rectangular) is not the point.

[r1k]

what about triangle pixels?  Essentially each pixel is cut into 2 right triangles, allowing for perfectly smooth 45 degree angles.  Okay, now it would probably be too impractical to pixel images that way, but it got me thinking how other angles would end up looking, and I tried drawing some up and figuring out how AA would work just for fun.  Heres what I came up with

Id be interested if anyone could come up with better AA solutions.

[rikfuzz]

That's pretty interesting.  But if you slice a pixel diagonally, bottom pixels will look blue and top pixels will look red unless you have a solution for the placement of the RGB subpixels:

http://www.dansdata.com/images/sm152b/pointerdetail.jpg

I reckon except for very low resolutions (large pixels) you won't see any difference at all, but there'll be still considerable added complexity.

CRT monitors did (often?) use triangular configurations of round sub pixels, but at that density it's essentially one image, rather than the illustrated jigsaw-puzzle type deal.  

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/CRT_screen._closeup.jpg

Also totally skipped my mind, but how can you flip that image with your proposed pixel configuration?  Total mess!   

[r1k]

oh darn youre right flipping it becomes a total mess, back to the drawing board I guess.
how about cutting it into 4 regular triangles... Ill have to try it out.
ya it wouldnt really matter except at low resolutions, but its kind of fun to just see how it would look in my opinion.

edit: okay so 4 regular triangels should essential give the same results, but be a bigger hassle to work with, but should be flippable (I think..)

[Grimsane]

even at 1x such configurations will have little discernible difference between it and pixels



2x size pixels and a screen pattern (could be any of the shapes you describe) it's fruitless, interesting for a restriction for your art but nothing more, I'm sure alot of the "scientists" and technicians that have been making and developing displays for decades came to a similar conclusion, it's not efficient or economical because it would likely just be harder to manufacture with little to no discernible difference between it and the current methods,

besides you miss the point to some degree, pixel's are the digital picture element used to display visual data, monitors don't have "pixels" they are dot matrices and essentially each element is basically circular in nature anyway, and with cathode ray methods they were circular rays of light clustered closely together anyway as far as I recall.

and in all likely hood anything more complex than a 4 sided pixels are going to have more overhead than is worthwhile, and as you are doing it now you are relying on square pixels to form your proposed patterns which is a bizarre paradox within itself

[surt]

When I first heard the term "Retina Display" I imagined it would be a display mimicking the distribution of retinal cells with pixels positioned in a blue noise distribution and brightness weighted by the area of the voronoi cell.
Sadly I was wrong.
Addressing would have been a pain in the arse.

[r1k]

it's fruitless, interesting for a restriction for your art but nothing more

dont get me wrong, I agree completely, just having a bit of fun.  If youve ever seen my pixeljoint account youd see I like doing alot of images with wierd restrictions.

[Danik]

There's this art tool coming which uses hexagons, "hexels":
http://www.hexels.com/
http://tedmartens.wordpress.com/tag/hexels/
You could say hexagons are sort of half way between pixels and circles.
I'm not sure how practical it is but it sure is an interesting idea.

[ptoing]

Make a forum search for "hixel"

[Friend]

: O These hixels from the simple splash art on the hexels.com thing look really interesting.  It kinda looks more organic, but still has the pixel feel.  Do they have any technical backing, or are just a part of the "silly restrictions" category?

[ptoing]

What do you mean by "technical backing".
I would say it falls under silly experimental restrictions.

[Friend]

What do you mean by "technical backing".
I would say it falls under silly experimental restrictions.

Sorry I didn't word that well. I meant if they are justifiable through a technical perspective. Hope that makes more sense.