Bad Apple but it's played on a patterned illumination microscope

April 20, 2025

One of my favorite memes is people playing Bad Apple!! on weird hardware.

The music video is black-and-white, high-contrast animation from the Touhou Project game series and which makes it perfectly suited for being played on almost anything: oscilloscopes, Desmos, Fluid dynamics simulations, floppy drives, printers, typewriters, Minecraft sheep, Apple peels, etc. The only thing needed is a system capacle of expressing binary 0's and 1's.

Here I tried playing Bad Apple on one of my lab's microscopes. This is also my first Youtube video!

Pattern formation: — Vialux DMD. Each mirror flips between “on” and “off,” acting like a 1-bit movie projector.

Camera: A Teledyne Kinetix run at 80 Hz (its usual day job is catching millisecond-scale voltage spikes at 800 Hz during Optopatch experiments).

Fluorescent target: A thin fluorescent layer turns “on” pixels into bright spots, so each frame is literally written in light.