A week ago, you had a framed picture of your girlfriend sitting on your workdesk. Any time you felt bored at work, you would glance at it and be inspired. Yeah, you were a smitten fool. The same frame now sits wrecked in the trash after she dumped you last Wednesday night over SMS. Ouch. You need something new to sit on your desk and make you smile when the turmoil of work just gets too much, preferably one that won’t break your heart and hook up with her personal trainer at the gym. We have a feeling this Game Frame qualifies for the job.
Made by LEDSEQ, it’s, basically, a digital picture frame that displays images in pixelated form like digital picture frames would have done if they existed in the 80s. It’s that simple. You can have it display iconic characters from 80s games, modern pixel art, or just general weirdness that comes hand-in-hand with the whole pixel graphic fascination.
The Game Frame measures 7.25 x 7.5 x 2 inches (w x h x d), making for ideal placement on a desk or a side table. To ensure the best quality pixel display, it uses a grid of 256 ultra-bright LEDs, each projecting their lights through a mesh chamber onto a sheet of white velum. The design strictly isolates the color of each pixel, resulting in a very vivid appearance, while a laser-cut black overlay sharply defines the grid borders. There’s no global backlight, creating a visual effect that seems more alive than similar products we’ve seen.
It runs as a standalone digital frame, with all images (it uses BMP) pulled from a removable SD card. The card comes with over 40 preloaded pixel animations from eBoy, although you can, pretty much, load any bitmap file you want on there, as well. Two buttons are available on the frame itself — one to access the setup and another to skip to the next file on the card. Directly from the menu, you can set brightness levels, playback mode, and the refresh timer (how long before it switches to a new image to display). There’s also a bonus Breakout-style game just for the heck of it.
Currently, Game Frame is a fully-funded project that’s still running on Kickstarter (just a couple more days left, though). Pledges to reserve a unit starts at $230.