HP has announced a futuristic new personal computer called Sprout that hopes to transform the way we interact with our computers. The system consists of an all-in-one Windows 8 computer, a system of 3D scanning cameras, a large tactile touchpad, and a projector that beams a display onto the touchpad.
It's a computer that may make working with photos as easy as moving your hands around on your desk.
Digital picture frames seemed like a brilliant idea about six or seven years ago. But the low-res screens, clunky interfaces and lack of any sort of standard operational platform left them to be a fairly niche market floundered when it arrived into the world.
Fireside is a small start-up that's looking to breathe new life and ideas into this market. After two years of development, they’ve created a "smart" picture frame called SmartFrame that rethinks how photos are curated and displayed on the walls of your home.
Cameras have many different methods of guiding photographers toward capturing quality shots, but physical feedback isn't really one of them... yet. In addition to providing useful visual and auditory information, DSLRs in the future might actually guide photographers through their sense of touch.
A recently published Nikon patent shows a DSLR that helps photographers capture moving objects without having to look through their viewfinder. Instead, the camera uses vibrations to guide the shooter.
Here's both a neat picture and a mind-blowing fact for you. What you see above is the IBM Model 350 Disk File from 1956. It weighed over a ton, contained fifty 24-inch disks, and was leased to companies for $3,200 per month. It could hold... 3.75 Megabytes.
That means that it would take 21 of these puppies to hold the largest 14-bit RAW file the Nikon D800 spits out.
Dacuda, a company known for its camera-related applications, is getting ready to release 3DAround, an intuitive 360-degree interactive photo capturing app.
Designed with simplicity in mind, 3DAround uses a clever interface to help direct you as to how to capture objects with minimal ‘scanning’ of your smartphone’s camera.
Macro photography is a wonderful tool for scientists and researchers, but the complex nature of capturing detailed, focus-stacked macro images of everything from insects to the human tongue puts the tool out of reach of many.
The Macropod photographic system solves this by making the entire process both portable and automatic, and producing some of the sharpest, most striking macro photographs we've ever seen.
Your smartphone's camera might fall short of the typical DSLR in just about every respect, but there is one thing it now do that not even your ultra-portable mirrorless camera can handle: your math homework.
No, we're not talking about shutting down the camera and opening your calculator app, what we're talking about is PhotoMath, a new app from MicroBLINK that uses your smartphone camera to solve equations for you.
It might not be the most useful website ever designed, but Flickr's new Park or Bird microsite serves a purpose: namely, it's the Flickr Vision team's response to a challenge by the popular webcomic XKCD.
A single pixel color digital camera sounds an awful lot like a camera that captures a single bright red, green or blue dot, but when scientist Ben Greer set out to build his own single pixel camera, that's not what he was creating at all.
No, by moving a little autmatic arm in front of the sensor, scanning the scene multiple times, and then getting into a bit of math, he built something that can take actual pictures.
In the future, "Auto" may be an option for choosing between JPEG and RAW on Canon DSLRs. A recently published patent reveals that the company has tinkered with the idea of a feature that could automatically choose which photos to save in RAW and which ones to save as JPEG only.
Sony today announced the new IMX224MQV 1/3-inch 1.27MP CMOS sensor, which is said to have the world’s highest level of sensitivity for any sensor in its class. But before you get excited about that night vision point-and-shoot you've been wanting, you should know something: it was designed specifically for use in automobile cameras.
Scientists at the University of California are looking to crowdsource their efforts to measure and track the unimaginable number of cosmic ray particles that bombard the Earth every second of the day. And all you need to participate is a smartphone with a camera and the researchers' app.
If you've ever used a lithium-ion battery for many years, you've probably experienced the gradual loss of the ability to hold charge over time. Thanks to researchers over in Singapore, however, future Li-ion batteries will last much, much longer than present day ones.
Scientists at Nanyang Technology University have developed a new type of lithium ion battery that can reach a 70% charge in a mere two minutes and will keep charging day in and day out for over 20 years. Yes, you read that right. Two decades.
In the ongoing app battle to keep private photos safe and sound from unintended recipients (and the general public), a new app called Yovo – You Only View Once – brings an interesting technology to the table.
It's called D-fence, and is based around the idea that your eyes can see what's behind a slatted fence as you're driving by at a high speed.
While it’s the fifth most common type of cancer in the United States and the deadliest of all skin cancers, melanoma can often be cured if caught early enough. So, in an effort to step up early detection efforts, a team of researchers at Duke University have developed a gigapixel whole-body camera that captures high-resolution images that will allow doctors to more quickly and effectively diagnose melanoma.
One day soon, people around the world may be contributing vast amounts of information to the science of space using a cheap 3D-printed telescope and smartphone with a high-res camera.
The Open Space Agency (OSA) is trying to make that dream happen, and the telescope they've created is called the Ultrascope.
At the Adobe MAX 2014 conference this past week, Adobe showed off some of the crazy technology current brewing in the company's labs. Two of them offer a glimpse at what may soon be available to photographers in Photoshop: changing the time of day (i.e. lighting) in photographs with a simple slider and removing haze from a scene automatically.
Ever wonder how the tech packed inside of your new Nikon lens actually works? How does Vibration Reduction provide 4.5 stops of stabilization? And what about the silent motors, how do those work?
In a video released earlier today, Nikon Asia decided to peel away the outer shell of its glass and show you, revealing the technology that makes a Nikkor Lens a Nikkor.
Panasonic might have found the last piece of the puzzle keeping many DSLR users from switching over to mirrorless cameras.
The above image is taken from a patent that diagrams the basics behind adding an optical viewfinder to mirrorless cameras. Even more interesting, the viewfinder would be able to change focal length when synced with any Micro Four Thirds lens.
In Google’s ongoing effort to ‘Street View’ some of the most incredible places on Earth, the company has pushed the limits of the 360-degree genre once again.
This time, Google set out to capture a panoramic view of the Liwa Desert in the United Arab Emirates, by strapping their Street View Trekker Camera onto the back of a willing camel.
The other day I created a Google+ album of photos from our holiday in France. Google’s AutoAwesome algorithms applied some nice Instagram-like filters to some of them, and sent me emails to let me have a look at the results. But there was one AutoAwesome that I found peculiar. It was this one, labeled with the word “Smile!” in the corner, surrounded by little sparkle symbols.
It’s a nice picture, a sweet moment with my wife, taken by my father-in-law, in a Normandy bistro. There’s only one problem with it. This moment never happened.
What's the use of an image sensor that's 12 times more color sensitive than the human eye? We're not entirely sure, but thanks to a team of researchers at Universities of Granada, Spain and Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy you may someday get to try it out and find out for yourself.
Researchers at those two universities are using "Transverse Field Detector" technology to distinguish 36 individual color channels without any need for a filter, making it 12-times more color sensitive than standard Red/Green/Blue sensors and the human eye both.
When imaging company Kogeto created Dot -- a clever little system that gave the iPhone 4 360º panoramic video -- little did the general public know that this was merely a stepping stone towards what they really wanted to create. Three years later, they’ve finally let the panoramic cat out of the bag.
It’s called Joey, and it’s a professional-grade 360° 4K video capture device with a seemingly endless list uses.
What does your ideal self actually look like? That's the question that photographer Scott Chasserot seeks to answer with his experiment, Original Ideal. By using portrait photography, Photoshop and brainwave scanners, he thinks he can pinpoint the version of your portrait that you find most appealing.
What's the difference between the results of a $300 consumer lens and a $3,000 top-of-the-line lens? If piccure is to be believed, one answer is "post-processing."
Today, the German computational photography company is releasing a new version of its software called piccure+ that can effortlessly correct the flaws of cheap glass, allowing photographers to obtain high image quality without having to spend a fortune on gear.
Smartphone cameras have improved exponentially since their introduction to the world, but one company still believes there's plenty of room for improvement. That company is DynaOptics and their latest tech is promising to pack optical zoom into more smartphones without adding any bulk to the phones at all.
Mimicking animal and bug vision to create unique and interesting cameras is nothing new. Bug vision cameras with, for example, infinite depth of field, have been made in the lab before. But researchers at University of Queensland in Australia are developing a camera that can do something pretty unique: it can see cancer.
The idea came after the scientists discovered that mantis shrimp have this incredibly useful ability.
If the idea of a wearable camera drone seems downright strange to you, you're probably not alone, but a new wrist-mounted flying concept camera called the Nixie makes this strange idea seem both possible and completely logical.
Here's a new reason you might want to consider picking up a Google Glass if you're a photographer: it can be used as a light meter.
A new app called Google Glass Light Meter is trying to pioneer a new way of metering light -- with a device strapped to your face instead of held in your hand.
Over the past 24 hours, the Earth has been experiencing its autumnal equinox. That is, the length of day and night across the globe was the same due to the sun hitting the earth at just the right angle to align its shade perfectly with the Earth’s spin axis.
And thanks to the photographic work of Russian satellite Elektro-L, we get an awesome (albeit quick) view of this bi-annual occurrence from a pretty spectacular vantage point: space.
Cynthia Breazeal envisions a world in which every family has its own personal robot helping out at home -- one that can help out around the house, and even help take photographs when needed. To turn this idea into a reality, the MIT robotics professor has created a robot called JIBO.
The robot has already become a top 5 most funded campaign on Indiegogo after raising over $2.2 million from over 5,500 supporters.
At Photokina 2014, Sony is a showing off its new autofocus technology called "4D Focus." It's an AF system that blankets the scene with a wide coverage area and can rapidly focus on subjects while predicting their movements over time.
Say hello to 4K video recording with the iPhone... but first you'll need a 5S model and a cool $999. That's how much you'll need to pay in the App Store to purchase Vizzywig 4K, which touts itself as the world's first mobile app that lets you capture, edit, and distribute 4K video.
The "Internet of Things" is likely what the future holds, but it's a future that has it share of security concerns. As more and more devices are making their way online, hackers will have newer points of entry into our lives.
Case in point: a security researcher has shown that Canon Pixma printers can be hacked to run custom code. As an example, he loaded the game Doom onto the printer.
Researchers at UC Berkeley have created software that automatically averages hundreds or thousands of similar images to create the pinnacle of amalgamations.
Unveiled last month, AverageExplorer lets users see the average image that represents whatever collection of images they’re looking at. The idea is to break down the overwhelming amount of images given when searching through Google Images, Flickr or Bing and combining it into one visual summary of the result.
The idea that 4K+ resolution video will soon become a big thing in still photography is one rooted in convenience. While it doesn’t seem video will overtake still photography for good anytime soon, Amateur Photographer wanted to dip their toes in the water.
In a recent experiment, the Amateur Photographer team decided that the September 20th issue of their magazine would feature a cover that uses a still image extracted from video shot at 4K.
DigitalGlobe really wants people to get behind their super-high res public imaging satellite, the WorldView-3, and understand just how useful it could be. To that end, they're showing off the satellite's capabilities once again, this time using the onboard infrared sensor to see beneath the smoke of a California forest fire and capture some incredibly detailed images of the inferno.
Image stabilization is a tricky business. There are a plethora of ways to do it: optical image stabilization, algorithmic stabilization and, more recently, hybrid options that combine the best of analogue and digital input.
A great example is Instagram’s new Hyperlapse app, which gathers data from the accelerometer built into your iPhone and uses that data to digitally correct for camera shake and give you smooth footage.
And now, an upcoming product called SteadXP wants to do the same thing for your DSLR or GoPro.
Besides sensor size, quality glass is the other major hurdle that smartphones need to overcome if they ever want to truly compete, quality-wise, with their bigger more capable brothers.
But since attaching a 500mm lens to a smartphone looks... well... kind of dumb, the folks at Canadian startup Algolux are taking a software-based approach and producing some truly incredible results in the process.
We’ve seen low-light photography before, but what about no light photography. While it seems borderline impossible, researchers have combined a number of techniques to produce photographs in almost complete darkness, where the resulting images are using less than one photon of light per pixel!
There are a lot of great, fun, and interesting things people can do with an iPhone and that FLIR 'predator vision' infrared camera case we told you about at the beginning of this year. But, as it turns out, there is also a very bad thing people can do.
Using just an iPhone and the Thermal camera case, people can actually steal your PIN codes, be that for an ATM or that keypad on your car or garage door.
This photo isn't actually a photo. From the furniture to the beautiful light falling on the countertops and wood floors, what you're looking at is a CGI rendering that has replaced 75% of the 'photos' in the IKEA catalogs the college kids, divorced men and NYC residents in your life have lying around.
Instagram only just released Hyperlapse earlier this week, and already it’s amassed a cult-like following thanks to its dead-simple interface and amazing results.
But, as simple as the interface may be and as impressive as the results are, what happens between when the app is opened and the final hyperlapse actually involves a lot of incredibly technology at work.
Using photographs released by the militant group ISIS (The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and satellite imagery openly available to everybody, a group of crowd-funded citizen journalists believe they have pinned down the location of an ISIS training camp.
A Belgian company called SpaceBooth is planning to launch its own little -- and we mean really little -- satellite photo both before 2015. Its mission? To give you the chance to have your photo taken with the Earth, Moon or stars as the backdrop... for free.
Outdoor brand Mammut recently teamed up with avid climbers Dani Arnold and Stephan Siegrist to document and create an incredible interactive 360º climb up the side of Eiger: a 13,000-foot tall mountain in the Alps.
Make-up can be a pain on photo shoots, can’t it? Well, imagine if you didn’t need make-up on a shoot to alter the look of a model’s skin. Now stop imagining, because it’s a reality, thanks to this interesting real-time face tracking and projection mapping technology.
In an interesting development in the world of batteries, researchers have discovered and demonstrated a way to make extremely efficient carbon electrodes by heating up the fibers of hemp in a two-step method.
The resulting carbon electrodes hold as much energy as the super-material graphene, are more durable in extreme temperatures, and come at a much lower cost -- pretty much the ideal material to make batteries out of.
The European Space Agency has designed a disposable piece of equipment affectionately referred to as the Break Up Camera. As you could expect from the name, the sole purpose of the camera is to capture it’s own death.
How will it capture its own death though? With the help of a dedicated Infrared camera, hooked up to a storage device that will be contained in a ceramic-shielded Reentry SatCom.
As medium format and full-frame cameras get more affordable and file sizes cross the line from massive to outrageous, any increase in transfer and backup speeds is greatly appreciated. Which is why the new USB Type C standard should have photographers as excited as any other tech nerd out there.