By now, you’ve probably heard about Project Glass, Google’s ambitious effort to develop a pair of Internet-connected, augmented reality camera glasses. Well, something similar was being explored for a different clothing item: the t-shirt…
tshirtOS is a concept created in collaboration by whisky-maker Ballantine and futuristic-clothes maker CuteCircuit that aims to build a camera, microphone, headphone hack, and integrated display into an Internet-connected shirt. Read more…
Ever since NASA’s Curiosity rover landed on Mars and started beaming back photographs earlier this week, people have been wondering, “why are the photos so bad?” The criticism seems merited: consumers these days are snapping great high-res photographs using phones that cost just hundreds of dollars, yet NASA can’t choose a camera with more than 2-megapixels of resolution for their $2.5 billion mission?
In an interview with dpreview, project manager Mike Ravine of Malin Space Science Systems — the company that provided three of the rover’s main cameras — explains that there were a couple main reasons behind the “lame” cameras: data transfer and fixed specifications. Read more…
Cameras these days are smart enough to recognize the faces found inside photographs and label them with names. What if the same kind of recognition could be done for the locations of photographs? What if, instead of using satellite geodata, the camera could simply recognize where it is by the contents of the photographs?
That’s what research being done at Carnegie Mellon University and INRIA/Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris may one day lead to. A group of researchers have created a computer program that can identify the distinctive architectural elements of major cities by processing street-level photos. Read more…
Face detection has become the snapshot photographer’s invaluable assistant in ensuring tack-sharp faces, but soon it’ll be able to add two more job responsibilities to its resume: exposure metering and speedier autofocus. Two patents recently awarded to Apple show that future iOS cameras (perhaps the next iPhone?) will have standard camera features that rely much more on face detection technology. The first patent, titled “Dynamic exposure metering based on face detection“, allows the camera to automatically select faces as the primary target for metering. In more difficult situations — group shots or people standing in front of a crowd, for example — the camera will use factors such as “head proximity” to select the primary subject. Read more…
YouTube just announced a useful new feature: an easy face blur option. The announcement says the feature is aimed for news and human rights agencies to protect privacy and identities especially if posting images of activists who may need to remain anonymous or if minors are present in the videos and privacy is a concern. Read more…
Professor and self-proclaimed cyborg Steve Mann created an eye and memory-aid device he calls the EyeTap Digital Glass. The EyeTap, worn by Mann above on the left, is a wearable device that is similar to Google Eye, pictured right, but he’s been making them at home since the 1980s. The goal of his project is to use images to aid memory, or even to augment the memories of people with Alzheimer’s Disease or who simply want to preserve their memories more permanently. However, a recent misunderstanding over Mann’s technology allegedly caused a confrontation between Mann and several employees at a Paris McDonald’s restaurant. Read more…
“Super-Resolution From a Single Image” is an interesting research page by computer scientists over at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. It details the group’s efforts to create sharp enlargements of small photographs, and offers comparisons between their algorithm and other popular ones being used and researched (e.g. nearest neighbor, bi-cubic). The large image of the baby seen above was created from the tiny image on the left. See if you can create something more useable using Photoshop.
Here’s a promotional/educational video by Canon that explains both how digital cameras work and how it manufactures them. Interesting fact: lenses are so precise that if they were to be enlarged to the size of a sports stadium, the margin of error would be less than the thickness of a business card.
This image might look like some kind of screenshot from an old 16-bit video game, but it’s actually the first photo ever made of an atom’s shadow. Researchers at Griffith University in Australia suspended a ytterbium atom in midair, shot it with a laser beam, and then used a Fresnel lens on the other side to snap a photograph of the dark shadow left by the atom. Scientist Erik Streed has a writeup explaining how they accomplished it and the project’s implications for other research.
Lytro has been pushing to make their living pictures — interactive, clickable photos that have a variable focus point — easier to share. Lytro is a camera that has a very specific, proprietary way of saving and viewing photographs, so sharing these photos can be tricky. Nevertheless, Lytro has been able to quickly expand living photos across the web through social media, most recently to Google+ and Pinterest through Google Chrome extensions. Read more…
