A week ago Canon announced the development of a APS-H CMOS sensor that delivers a staggering 120 megapixels. Not content with ruling the megapixel race, they’ve just announced a physically gigantic sensor — the largest CMOS sensor in the world.

In the photo above, the sensor is shown next to a standard 35mm full frame sensor. The thing measures 202 x 205 mm (or 7.95 x 8.07 inches), or 40 times the size of current sensors, and is extremely sensitive. It can supposedly record 60fps video under moonlight. Potential applications of this kind of sensor include capturing the night sky and documenting nocturnal animal behavior, though (like the 120MP sensor) you probably shouldn’t expect this to hit the consumer market anytime in the near or semi-distant future.

At SIGGRAPH 2010 in Los Angeles last month, Microsoft researchers showed off some new technology that improves existing digital blur reduction techniques by outfitting a camera with motion detecting sensors.

The team created an off-the-shelf hardware attachment consisting of a three-axis accelerometer, three gyroscopes, and a Bluetooth radio, attaching the setup to a Canon 1Ds Mark III camera. The researchers then created a software algorithm to use the motion information captured during the exposure to do “dense, per-pixel spatially-varying image deblurring”.
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The Pileus Internet Umbrella is a cool research project that aims to connect an umbrella to the cloud and use the available space on the underside of the umbrella as a screen for projecting photographs.

Using the Flickr API, the umbrella can upload photographs wirelessly using a built-in camera and browse photographs using wrist snaps for navigation.

The product aims to provide an augmentation of everyday life synchronizing information on the Internet and the real place.

Here’s what the name “Pileus” means:

“Pileus” is an ancient Latin word originally meaning skullcap, and now used as technical worlds for a cloud that appear above a cumulus at meteorology and a cap of mushrooms at mycology . The project uses this word for the name with double metaphors as a physical umbrella (mushroom cap) and cyber network services (overlaid cloud).

Sadly, the umbrella is currently only a prototype. If it were to ever hit the market, would you buy one?

(via Photojojo)

Image credit: Pileus Internet Umbrella by 22n

You’ve probably seen head-mounted cameras that capture point-of-view photos or videos before, but EyeSeeCam takes the POV concept to a new level. It’s a unique gaze-driven camera that focuses on whatever your eyes are looking at, making it the first camera system that records what your eyes are actually looking at. Here’s a demonstration of what the setup currently looks like in action:

Here’s a video created by the camera system showing the wearer reading a book:

Imagine the possibilities of this technology if it were made compact and ultra-portable. In a few years we might be beaming our personal memories to some data storage service for future reference. Rather than telling stories of our youth to grandchildren, we could show them the memories themselves.

Can you think of any interesting or useful applications of this technology if it were made more practical?

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.

(via PhysOrg)

Image credit: Photo and illustration by the University of Toronto

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.

(via Engadget)

In the future, we might be able to roam around a 3D virtual representation of our world, where everything you see was automatically generated from photographs taken at the real locations.

Vision researchers at the University of Washington and Cornell University have been working on turning photographs of things in the real world into 3-dimensional representations. This research could eventually turn snapshots into virtual buildings, neighborhoods, and possibly cities.

PhotoCity is a new online game created by researchers that aims to harness the power of crowdsourcing in order to obtain the photographs needed for reconstructing these locations. Here’s a short 1 minute introduction of how the game works:

In addition to playing with a 2 or 3 megapixel camera, they’ve also released an iPhone app:

We’re pretty darn excited to see how photography will play a role in the technologies we’ll be using in the future.

Thanks for the tip, @eugenephoto

P.S. If you haven’t seen the TED 2007 demo of Microsoft’s Sea Dragon and Photosynth technologies, you’re in for a treat.