In 1877, photographer Eadweard Muybridge settled a longstanding debate on whether or not a horse completely leaves the ground at any point during its gallop by taking a single photograph of a horse completely airborne. In the same way, photography was also used recently by a group of researchers to uncover the mystery of how cats drink.
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A couple days ago our minds were blown by a diminished reality demonstration showing objects being removed from live video feeds. Today’s mind-blowing video is a demonstration of MovieReshape, an image manipulation program by German researchers that’s going to make it much harder to believe anything our eyes see in future videos. As you can see in the demonstration above, the software allows physical characteristics of a person in a video to be manipulated by simply dragging sliders around.
It’s a pretty interesting — albeit scary — glimpse at where technology is headed.
(via f stoppers)
Content aware fill was mind-boggling enough when it came out earlier this year, but what if the same concept could be applied to video… while the camera is recording? That’s the idea behind Diminished Reality, a topic being researched by Jan Herling and Wolfgang Broll at the Ilmenau University of Technology in Germany. Basically, you select something in the scene against a uniform background, and it disappears from the resulting video. Pretty crazy.
Here’s a glimpse into what viewing photographs might be like for future generations: Brother Industries is working on a special pair of glasses called the AirScouter that can project images directly into your retina, making you see a 16-inch display that doesn’t actually exist floating 3 feet in front of your face.
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In the future, focusing on the wrong subject when taking a picture might be a thing of the past. At Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference this year Adobe gave a demonstration of how plenoptic lenses can be used to allow focus to be arbitrarily chosen after the image is captured during post-processing. These are microlens arrays containing hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands (Stanford researchers used a camera with 90,000 lenses) of tiny lenses that record much more information about a scene than traditional single lenses.
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Barcodes can be found everywhere, but using existing barcode systems with ordinary cameras require that the barodes be printed large or that the camera be placed close to the code. MIT’s Bokode project is a new system that magically stuffs barcodes into bokeh, allowing ordinary cameras to be used as barcode readers from a distance. The codes are contained in little points of light that only turn into codes when viewed through an out-of-focus camera lens. You’ve probably seen how little bright points of light grow into larger and fainter points of light when you defocus.
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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?
