I’m not sure how useful this would be for most people, but it’s a neat look at the kinds of technologies people are working on to enrich our photo sharing experience. Pass-Them-Around is an app developed by researchers at Nokia that lets you share digital photographs with friends sitting around a table as if you had physical prints sitting in front of you. The phones can also be placed side by side to act as larger displays for the photos.
Mobile photo sharing star Instagram just announced its 5 millionth member and will soon pass 100 million photos, but their domination of the market may not last much longer. According to TechCrunch, Facebook — a service that receives 6 billion photos a month and stores 100 billion photos total — is currently working on a feature-packed iPhone app that may soon be ubiquitous on iPhones.
The information comes from 50MB of images and documents leaked to the blog, and TechCrunch says that the app can be described as Path meets Instagram meets Color meets With. Unlike the legions of photo sharing apps struggling to capture users, Facebook can simply tap its 600+ million users to instantly dominate the market — much like it did with photo sharing on the web.
Update: TechCrunch has just published a large number of screenshots showing the app in action.
What if you could take perfect group photographs by first shooting multiple frames and then selecting the best portions of each one? Microsoft amazed us with this concept last year with its Photo Fuse technology, and now we may soon be seeing something similar coming to mobile phone cameras (and hopefully compact cameras as well). Imaging technology company Scalado gave the above demonstration at a conference earlier this month showing off Rewind, a super-useful feature that shoots a burst of full-res photos, then lets you select the best faces for each person in the image. Next up on our wishlist: Content Aware Fill.
Apple is looking to make an even bigger splash in the camera market with the photography-related features they’ve included in the upcoming iOS 5, with one of the huge ones being cloud connectivity. iPhones running iOS 5 will be connected to iCloud, Apple’s online backup solution, and every photograph captured will be automatically and wirelessly copied to the cloud and into the user’s “Photo Stream”. The photos can then be accessed from other computers and devices, and are deleted after 30 days unless moved to a permanent folder.
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Swedish Alex Breton spent 11 years and and $10 million developing the PrintBrush, a printer that lets you print onto paper by simply rubbing the handheld device across the surface. While traditional printers must move paper through a machine in order to accurately track the position of the page, the PrintBrush works more like an optical mouse, tracking the paper underneath with lasers. A camera-equipped PaintBrush is set to hit the market in early 2012, letting people everywhere print photos instantly on any flat surface!
Apple recently filed a patent having to do with baking infrared communication capabilities into the iPhone. Although there are certainly useful applications for the technology (e.g. a museum beaming information to the phone at different exhibitions), what’s troubling is that the feature may also allow the camera to be remotely disabled by those who wish to prevent photography.
[...] the transmitter could be located in an area where photography is prohibited and the infrared signal could include encoded data that represents a command to disable recording functions.
This example could easily apply to movie theatres trying to stop customers from filming a movie for illegal distribution or any kind of music concert to protect an artist’s image from being photographed or videoed illegally, as shown below. [#]
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want a camera that could be disabled remotely by a third party…
(via Patently Apple via Engadget)
Illinois industrial design student Ned Mulka created this Nikno D5R concept camera for his senior thesis design project. While the design itself may be pretty iffy for a camera, the main idea behind it is pretty interesting — instead of having to rotate the camera itself for portrait orientation photos, why not only rotate the sensor, mirror, and viewfinder? An even crazier design would involve only rotating the sensor, allowing the camera to shoot any orientation without having to change how you hold the camera — though this would probably be an engineering nightmare for the camera makers.
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Rather than using traditional instant film that develops on the spot, newer instant cameras are using a special ZINK technology that prints digital photos rather than exposing special paper. As more and more consumers rely solely on their mobile phones for shooting casual snapshots, perhaps the Sophie concept iPhone case is the next step in instant film’s evolution: it’s a case with a built-in printer that turns your iPhone into a Polaroid-style instant camera. What do you think of the idea?
(via Yanko Design)
The Leica i9 is a concept camera case dreamed up by design firm BLACK Design Associates for the iPhone 4. Unlike the Slow Photography Camera we shared last week, the i9 is actually an independent camera that simply uses the iPhone as a giant touch screen and as a modem for the web.
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We covered the WVIL (wireless viewfinder interchangeable lens) concept camera at the beginning of the year when the design team behind it released a fake video of it being showed off at CES 2011. The above video is another neat glimpse at the supposedly patent-pending design, which puts all the camera functions in the lens itself, leaving the camera body to function as a wireless display and control panel. What do you think of the idea?
WVIL (via PhotoWeeklyOnline)
