August 2011

Michael Zhang

GLMPS Captures the Moments Leading Up to iPhone Photographs

What if every photograph included a short video showing the few seconds that led up to the shutter being pressed? That's the idea behind a new free iPhone app called GLMPS (pronounced "glimpse"). It's a camera app that stores a few seconds of video with each shot, letting users share the background behind each picture (try clicking the photo above). Unlike normal iPhone photos, displaying a GLMPS photo/video requires a special embed code, make it somewhat inconvenient to share. Wouldn't it be interesting if short videos could be stored in the metadata of photographs taken by all digital cameras? Seems kinda farfetched, but it might be possible as technology progresses.

Michael Zhang

World’s Largest Stop Motion Animation

Not satisfied with creating a stop-motion animation of microscopic proportions, Nokia has gone in the opposite direction, this time turning a beach into what Guinness deemed the "world's largest stop motion animation set." The 12-megapixel stills were shot over five days using a Nokia N8 cell phone strapped to a 40 meter high cherry picker, and the largest scene spans a whopping 11,000 square feet!

Michael Zhang

Wallpaper Made Using 100,000 Facebook Photographs

What does it look like when every inch of a room's walls and ceiling are covered with photographs? German art students Joern Roeder and Jonathan Pirnay decided to find out through their project titled "fbFaces". Using a crawler that traverses the Facebook social graph, they harvested 100,000 profile pictures and used them to print out an intense wallpaper for the entire room.

Michael Zhang

Kodak Adopts ‘Poison Pill’ to Protect Against a Hostile Takeover

If you look at the price of Kodak's stock, you'll see that the company is currently worth about $600 million -- a figure that may be significantly lower than what its digital imaging patents could sell for. With the risk looming that a buyer might try to acquire the patents by simply taking over the company, Kodak is taking evasive maneuvers.