greyscale extension for B-movie;)

More photorealistic pictures on VMU!

How does it work?

The two visual effects that are used are:

fast blinking pixels (black->white->black.....) appear as being grey

a checker effect merges with increasing distance between viewer and screen into a single grey

When both are combined, we reach a total of 6! possible greyscale impressions that an area on screen can have.

On VMU, such a grey image consists of two separate images: the first holding the grey pixels and the second holding the black pixels (and grey, too). Now here a look at the image conversion and format:

The way onto the screen

source on PC

Any image, even colored photos are possible.

grey portion

The black pixels appear grey on VMU, they are blinking very fast.

black portion

These black pixels remain black on VMU.

VMU's 1. image

Identical with the grey portion image.

VMU's 2. image

Contains both images' black pixels: grey and black portion.

Looks better on VMU than just black portion.

result on VMU

This is a preview how it will look like on VMU.

problems

A problem that appears with the grey pixels is as follows: The blinking frequency of the grey pixels does(and can not) match exactly the LCD refresh rate. This results in flickering.

The real LCD refresh rate varies from VMU to VMU and I don't know of any way to determine when the LCD is refreshed (neither polling nor interupt seems possible). So I have implemented an adjust function, so that the delay between the blinks can be adjusted on the VMU itself. You can see it in the demo slideshow.