Game Boy Camera Powers Lo-Fi Wedding Photo Booth Like You’ve Never Seen

Physicist and self-described creator Sebastian Staacks is back with another wild photo booth creation. Rather than a DSLR-powered “bullet time” photo booth, Staacks built a Game Boy Camera photo booth.

Similar to 2023, when Staacks built his bullet-time photo booth, the new Game Boy Camera photo booth was also custom-built for a family wedding. As Staacks jokes, he has a lot of cousins.

“Another one of my cousins got married, so it was time for another photo/video booth,” Staacks writes on his blog, There Oughta Be. “This time it uses a Game Boy Camera and a Game Boy Printer.”

This is Staacks’ fifth custom booth he’s built for weddings, including one he made for his own, but the Game Boy Camera creation is by far the most lo-fi and pixelated. The celebrated Game Boy Camera, which has garnered a cult following in the DIY community in recent years, features a 0.014-megapixel monochrome image sensor.

In the case of the Game Boy Camera, the lack of resolution isn’t a downside; it’s fundamental to the camera’s appeal. Staacks’ cousin “loves old video game systems,” so combining Staacks’ prior work with the Game Boy Camera and his video photo booths made perfect sense.

The final setup comprises a Game Boy Pocket, a Game Boy Camera, a Sony a6400 mirrorless camera to record video from the same angle as the Game Boy Camera, a Game Boy Printer, and a Raspberry Pi 4 running a Python script that controls the entire setup. In a bit of nostalgic fun, the Game Boy Camera that Staacks used is the very one he got as a child — his first-ever digital camera.

Staacks developed what he calls the GB Interceptor in 2022, which enables him to take what the Game Boy Camera would typically send to the Game Boy and reroute it via a microcontroller. While a lot is going on under the hood, what this enables Staacks to do is turn the Game Boy Camera into the equivalent of a webcam, allowing it to record video. It’s fascinating tech, which Staacks presented about at the 37c3 Chaos Communication Congress.

For this project, it is enough to know that the Game Boy Camera in Staacks’ setup can capture both still and motion pictures using its 0.014-megapixel sensor. During a five-second window, the Game Boy Camera captures video plus three photos, which guests can then print off using a connected Game Boy Printer to take with them as souvenirs.

“In the end, the guests had a lot of fun, and especially my cousin, who also appreciates old video games, loved the Game Boy video/photo booth,” Staacks explains. “Of course, the final video with the clips from all the guests primarily used the footage from the ‘good’ camera. You would not want this memory of your wedding to be lost in 128×112 pixels, but I could use the Game Boy Camera footage to spice up the video.”

And in Sebastian’s typical fashion, he provides links to everything he designed and coded for the project so that others can get in on the fun.

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Image credits: Sebastian Staacks (There Oughta Be)