It is actually a technique used to this day on audio recordings, but that is yet another rabbit hole to fall into another time.
Dithering What is Dithering?Īccording to Wikipedia, “Dither is an intentionally applied form of noise used to randomize quantization error”, and is a technique not only limited to images. Reading that forum post kicked me down the rabbit hole, which this blog post tries to summarize. He put extensive work into making the dithering stable when camera movements occur. Knowing a tiny bit about dithering from my work on Squoosh, I was especially impressed with Obra Dinn’s ability to keep the dithering stable while I moved and rotated the camera through 3D space and I wanted to understand how it all worked.Īs it turns out, Lucas Pope wrote a forum post where he explains which dithering techniques he uses and how he applies them to 3D space. And yet Obra Dinn used it anyway and rekindled a long forgotten love for me. With HDR and wide gamut on the horizon, things are moving even further away to ever requiring any form of dithering. Screenshot of “The Secret of Monkey Island” using 16 colors.įor a long time now, however, we have had 8 bits per channel per pixel, allowing each pixel on your screen to assume one of 16 million colors. Now spend hours trying to find the right floppy disk with the drivers to get the “256 colors” or, gasp, “True Color” show up.
You may remember running Windows 95 with 16 colors and playing games like “Monkey Island” on it. The fact that I have never seen a 3D game with dithering like this probably stems from the fact that color palettes are mostly a thing of the past. Like in the picture, where you probably feel like there are multiple brightness levels when in fact there’s only two: Full brightness and black. Screenshot of “Return of the Obra Dinn”.ĭithering, so my original understanding, was a technique to place pixels using only a few colors from a palette in a clever way to trick your brain into seeing many colors. Apparently, this has been dubbed “Ditherpunk”, and I love that. Obra Dinn is a story puzzler that I can only recommend, but what piqued my curiosity as a software engineer is that it is a 3D game (using the Unity game engine) but rendered using only 2 colors with dithering. I am late to the party, but I finally played “Return of the Obra Dinn”, the most recent game by Lucas Pope of “Papers Please” fame. This article may contain traces of nostalgia and none of Lena.
I always loved the visual aesthetic of dithering but never knew how it’s done.
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