The Tiniest Tokens

Hi friends!

I’ve uploaded a new experiment—one that explores what’s possible with pixels (or more specifically, subpixels) on a computer monitor, inspired by Matt Sarnoff’s article about Subpixel Text Encoding (2008).

Did you know that each pixel is made up of three subpixels (Red, Green, Blue)? And if you tell a pixel to display “red”, then the red subpixel will be lit up, but not the other two? Or, if a pixel is “magenta”, it actually is lighting up the red and blue subpixels, but not the green one? Well, it’s true! (Pending some newer technology or fancy monitors with other pixel combinations, of course.) This allows you to essentially create pixel-text… or, more specifically, subpixel-text, by setting pixels to red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, or yellow, and it’ll show the text in a very tiny, but organised, format!

See the screenshot for what I’m talking about.

Anyways, sorry if this strains your eyes—open it on a screen or monitor at 100% scale and zoom in through a camera held up to the screen, and you’ll see what I’m talking about even more!

I had a great amount of fun experimenting with this one. And I even made a Unity project that can parse text and create an image from it…

As always, enjoy, friends! 😊

• Aaron