Researchers at the University of Toronto have come up with a new video camera that can achieve infinite depth of field even when objects are immediately in front of the camera. What they did was stuff an array of video cameras into a single camera, with each camera focused at a different distance. Software then calculates the distance of each object in the scene, and selects the individual pixel that has the object in focus. The resulting image is one in which every object, both near and far, is in focus.
Maybe in the future consumer cameras will also have an array of cameras, allowing us to have much more control over the photo (or video) in post-processing.
Students at the University of Tromso in Norway have created an interactive display wall using 28 separate projectors, which creates a 7168×3072, or 22 megapixel, display. Interactive with the display simply involves placing your hands in front of it. Touching the display itself is not necessary, and multitouch is supported. What better way to demonstrate the capabilities of such a system than zooming through a gigapixel photograph?
Gigapixel images are great, but navigating them on a regular sized display through a slow web browser isn’t such a great experience. This video shows how we navigate a 13.3 gigapixel image of Tromsø, Norway on a 22 megapixel display wall, using a custom, camera-based multi-touch interface and a custom system for high-performance navigation and visualization of high-resolution datasets.
Here’s an amazing video demonstrating the wall in action:
Ah… A glimpse of the future. We may soon find ourselves post-processing our photographs on our walls at home.
InVisage, a California-based start up company, has announced a new image sensor technology that it claims is up to four times more sensitive than traditional sensor technologies.
Their product, QuantumFilm, is a layer of semiconductor material added on top of the traditional silicon that uses quantum dots to gather light.
According to InVisage CEO Jess Lee, quantum dots have a 90% efficiency in gathering light, compared to the 50% of traditional silicon.
What this means is that we can expect cell phone cameras to improve at a much faster pace than what we’ve been seeing, since improving the performance of traditional silicon has proved difficult. Lee predicts that in two years, mobile phones will contain cameras that are superior than current digital cameras in both megapixels and light sensitivity.
If this turns out to be true, we will likely see a dramatic decrease in the number of point-and-shoot cameras sold, as more and more consumers rely solely on their camera phones.
Our Facebook page has been pretty popular since we started it months back. Up to this point, we’ve only been showing PetaPixel articles as entries on the page wall. We’re now opening up the wall for all of you to submit and share your own content with the PetaPixel community. Have a photograph you’d like seen? We’d like to see it! Have a link you’d like to share? Feel free to post it! If you have any questions regarding photography, you could ask on the wall as well. Of course, you can always set the filter to only show PetaPixel entries if you’d like.
We look forward to seeing all your awesome content! You can visit and become a fan of our Facebook Page here.
When we launched back in 2009, I decided to host PetaPixel on the same hosting plan as my personal website at 1&1. Their plans are cheap (~$7/month) and they offered enormous amounts of storage and unlimited bandwidth, so I decided to try hosting PP with them.
Things have gone pretty well over the past 9 months or so, especially since we were essentially hosting the blog for free. However, we’ve grown to a point where traffic is occasionally causing our site to go down, since 1&1 tries to keep server usage fair among its customers. We’ve learned that though they offered “unlimited” traffic hosting, it’s meant for small, personal websites that don’t hog the server’s resources.
We went down again for a short period of time today, signaling to me that we should probably begin moving to something that will support us better as we continue to grow. This weekend I’m planning on moving the site over to Rackspace Cloud, and the transition has already begun. If everything goes according to plan, by the time we resume posting next Monday we’ll be serving PetaPixel from our new home.
We’ll update this post when we’re at the new location and settled down. Have a great weekend, and see you on the flip side!
Update: If you can see this update then you’re visiting us at our new home. Welcome!
Camera phones may soon offer more megapixels than some DSLR cameras. Imaging company OmniVision announced today that they have developed a 14.6-megapixel image sensor that will fit in cell phones. These sensors are capable of both high-resolution still photography and 1080p high-definition video recording.
I wonder how long it will be before camera phone imaging quality rivals the quality of the best point-and-shoot cameras.
According to a patent filed in June 2007, Nikon is looking into adding an email client directly into their point-and-shoot cameras (DSLR users can breathe a sigh of relief). This would allow people to quickly email photographs from their cameras, rather than have to transfer them to a computer first.
Obviously this is being done more and more these days through the use of cameraphones, and having email capabilities in a camera might not be very useful unless the camera can access the Internet from anywhere. However, email capabilities would be extremely useful on a trip if you don’t have your laptop with you.
What do you think of this idea? Do point-and-shoot cameras need email?
Google announced a pretty awesome new product today called Google Goggles that has the potential to completely change the way we think about search. It’s basically an application that will tell you all sorts of information based on photographs you take with your camera phone.
Snap a photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge, and the application will provide you with search results for the Golden Gate Bridge. Want to learn what others are saying about a particular book in the store? Simply snap a photograph of the cover and Google Goggles will tell you.
The application is most useful in situations where you know know the name of what you’re trying to search for. For example, if you’re staring at a painting that you love but don’t know the name of, Google Goggles can quickly tell you all about it:
This is a great glimpse into the exciting technologies that we’ll be enjoying in the coming years, and is definitely only the tip of the iceberg. There will probably come a day when this type of search is fast enough and powerful enough to be displayed instantly on the screen while using the video feature of camera phones. This concept is being pursued by numerous tech companies (likely Google as well), and is called augmented reality.
For Google’s explanation of Google Goggle’s, check out this video they have on the official page:
Camera phones may soon offer more megapixels than some DSLR cameras. Imaging company 
