Triangulation of Attention: Tomorrow’s Instant Photojournalism

A couple of months ago, we spent some time telling you about CrowdOptic, a company that has been pioneering a way to sift through the millions of photos taken every second of every day and separate the “noise” from the “signal” when it comes to finding newsworthy content.

The company’s technology takes advantage of the fact that smartphone photographs today come with both GPS and heading data attached, allowing algorithms to determine not only where a photo was taken, but also what it was taken of. And in the video above, former football player Jim Kovach explains the tech in detail at TEDxSiliconAlley in New York City.

CrowdOptic’s algorithms take a massive set of photos and group them into clusters based on the number and direction of cameras pointing at a certain incident — all in a matter of seconds. In this way, the company has managed to solve several major issues that large news organizations have to deal with when using crowdsourced media.

Using this attention triangulation, news outlets will soon be able to sift through millions of images from confirmed sources (sources that are actually at the event) and multiple perspectives, instantly.

Check out the video for an in depth explanation and demo.