If you’ve always felt that you look more attractive in videos than you do in photographs, you’re not alone. A recent study done by researchers at UC Davis and Harvard has found that subjects generally find video footage of people more attractive than stills showing the same face. It turns out that looking attractive in photos is no easy feat due to what the researchers are calling the “frozen face effect.” Read more…
Jasna Hodzic, the photo editor of the student run newspaper at UC Davis, has been covering the Occupy UC Davis movement since its inception — before the pepper spraying incident became international news. Read more…
A team of researchers at UC Davis have come up with a super-cheap way of turning an iPhone into a microscope — useful for diagnosing diseases in areas where medical equipment is hard to come by. Inspired by the CellScope project at UC Berkeley, Sebastian Wachsmann-Hogiu decided to create something even smaller and cheaper. By taping a 1-millimeter ball lens embedded in a rubber sheet to the iPhone, he was able to boost magnification by 5x, which allows the camera to photograph blood cells. Only a small portion of each image is in focus, so they also utilize focus stacking to achieve more usable photos.
The best part is the price — each lens only costs $30-40, and would be even cheaper if mass produced.
One day, ordinary digital cameras might be able to capture not just the image of a scene, but the depth information of that scene as well, allowing 3D representations to be built afterward. UC Davis visualization researcher Oliver Kreylos took the Microsoft Kinect webcam-style sensor and built such a camera. The video above shows him demonstrating how the scene can be viewed in three dimensions after combining the information from the device’s infrared and color cameras.