LensVector, a Silicon Valley startup working on novel lens technology, has received its latest round of funding from In-Q-Tel, a not-for-profit venture firm that invests for the sole purpose of boosting US intelligence capability by providing the CIA with state-of-the-art information technology.

So what’s LensVector developing that CIA would want? Lenses that focus electronically with no moving parts.

Here’s a diagram by LensVector showing how their tiny autofocus lenses work compared to traditional technology:

Rather than using mechanical parts to focus a lens, LensVector uses electricity to align liquid crystals to a desired shape, which focuses light to a particular point.

Given the CIA’s interest in this technology, it must be working pretty well. Hopefully we’ll see this introduced to consumer cameras that need it (i.e. cell phones) soon.

A fun fact: another startup that received In-Q-Tel funding was Keyhole, Inc., the geospatial data visualization company that was acquired by Google in 2004. Their flagship product, Earth Viewer, was turned into Google Earth.

(via CNET)

PicTreat is a free online application that allows you to quickly and easily retouch portraits using patent-pending face detection and correction technology.

By “correction”, they mean the application can make your skin “smooth and shiny”, remove “irritating skin flaws”, fix red-eye, and correct color balance.

While we would prefer not to promote our culture’s obsession with outward appearance, we wanted to examine the technology behind this application.

Here’s an example of a before and after displayed on the front page:

To test exactly what the application does to a portrait, I decided to use the portrait of President Obama that I referred to recently. However, the app apparently couldn’t find any “blemishes”, and returned a nearly identical image — albeit with mildly smoother skin.

Thus, I decided to test how the service retouches a photograph by altering the photograph manually. Using Photoshop, I added some red-eye, added some spots to his face, and gave the photo a green tint. Here are the original, altered, and PicTreated images:

The app successfully corrected the artificial red-eye, restored the color to almost what it was originally, and left the random spots I added alone (which it should, lest it remove things like birthmarks).

In spite of the interesting technology behind PicTreat, many may find the app offensive due to the fact that it intentionally removes such things as freckles (a taboo among photo editors) and uses the slogan, “everybody’s perfect”.

What are your thoughts on this kind of service?

Image credit: Obama portrait by the Obama-Biden Transition Project

Adobe is working on a new feature for Photoshop called “Content Aware Fill”, and posted a mind-boggling demonstration of it on YouTube. The description states:

One of the biggest requests we get of Photoshop is to make adding, removing, moving or repairing items faster and more seamless. From retouching to completely reimagining an image, heres an early glimpse of what could happen in the future when you press the delete key.

Basically it allows you to alter or create reality in photographs as easily as selecting an area and running the feature. Gone will be the days when photojournalists are caught with embarrassing patterns created by improperly using the stamp tool. The demonstration is so amazing that many commenters are saying it’s fake, going as far as to say it looks… “photoshopped”?

What do you think of this feature and the sneak peek? Is it too good to be true, or will it change the way we think about photography forever?

(via PopPhoto)

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)

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.

(via CNET)

In other news, Wired is reporting that this technology will lead to wedding photography from phone cameras. Really?

Image credit: Photograph by InVisage

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.