Ratchet Up

High-Voltage Photograms: Robert Buelteman

Buelteman's technique is an elaborate extension of Kirlian photography (a high-voltage photogram process popular in the late 1930s) and is considered so dangerous and laborious that no one else will attempt it—even if they could get through all the steps.

Buelteman begins by painstakingly whittling down flowers, leaves, sprigs, and twigs with a scalpel until they're translucent. He then lays each specimen on color transparency film and, for a more detailed effect, covers it with a diffusion screen. This assemblage is placed on his "easel"—a piece of sheet metal sandwiched between Plexiglas, floating in liquid silicone. Buelteman hits everything with an electric pulse and the electrons do a dance as they leap from the sheet metal, through the silicone and the plant (and hopefully not through him), while heading back out the jumper cables. In that moment, the gas surrounding the subject is ionized, leaving behind ethereal coronas. He then hand-paints the result with white light shining through an optical fiber the width of a human hair, a process so tricky each image can take up to 150 attempts.

Because there's no lens to distort the colors, Buelteman's work replicates natural hues far better than traditional photographs. "I'm calling into question what we see every day," Buelteman says. "Is that really a flower? Have I been blind my entire life?" You can see for yourself in his recently published book, Signs of Life." [Wired]

Movies at 1000 FPS

From iMovix, the SprintCam V3 HD is the only HD native fully integrated ultra slow-motion system for broadcast, offering unmatched frame rates and high definition native resolution image quality. The system allows the user to capture from 500 to 1,000 frames per second and to replay them without delay ! Thus 20 to 40 times slower than usual speed, with HD native resolution image quality!

I-Movix SprintCam v3 NAB 2009 showreel from David Coiffier on Vimeo.

This new technology has applications in live sports and other live TV productions, but also in the production of commercials, documentaries, and movies.

A full system made up of 4 parts as it is the case for the SprintCam Live V2.1 system:

(1) a HD high-speed camera,

(2) an operational control panel, that allows you to do all traditional color settings, and to choose the frame rate that best corresponds to your needs,

(3) a slow motion remote with an new cueing system, that allows you to select a video sequence and instantly replay it with an HD-SDI output. The sequence can then be live broadcasted or stored on a EVS® LSM® server for a later use,

(4) a camera control unit, the heart of the system, enabling the slow-motion instant replay; this device controls the camera, receives the data from the camera and sends them to the EVS server, or to any SDI recorder. [iMovix]

Sheet of Fiber Makes A Camera

By integrating sensors into a plastic fiber, researchers make a large, flexible camera.

Textiles and the fibers that compose them are experiencing a sort of high-tech renaissance lately. Researchers are finding ways to turn silk into sensors by adding biological molecules to it, and turn cotton sheets into electronic fabric by bathing them in a solution of nanotubes. The idea is to use the electronic textiles, which are flexible and can be worn comfortably, to sense such things as the blood of a soldier or pathogens circulating in the air.

Now researchers at MIT have integrated a collection of light sensors into polymer fibers, creating a new type of camera. Yoel Fink, a professor of materials sciences and engineering and the lead researcher on the project, notes that a standard camera requires lenses that are usually rigid and heavy. A camera made from fibers, however, could be lightweight, robust, and even foldable. Although Fink admits that the applications aren't yet well defined, he suggests that such a fiber-based camera could be used in a large foldable telescope or integrated into soldiers' uniforms. [...]

In the researchers' most recent work, they integrate eight sensors into a polymer fiber--more than ever before. In order to make the camera, the researchers integrated the eight semiconducting light sensors into a polymer cylinder with a diameter of 25 millimeters, controlling the sensor's spacing and angle within the fiber. Once the sensors, made of a type of semiconducting glass, were in position, the polymer cylinder was heated and then stretched so that the diameter shrank the diameter of hundreds of micrometers--a process that is identical to the way in which commercial fiber is made for telecommunication applications--retaining the orientation of the sensors." [More]

A Screen That Looks Back

For decades, engineers have envisioned wearable displays for pilots, surgeons, and mechanics. But so far, a compact wearable display that's easy to interact with has proved elusive.

Researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems (IPMS) have now developed a screen technology that could help make wearable displays more compact and simpler to use. By interlacing photodetector cells--similar to those used to capture light in a camera--with display pixels, the researchers have built a system that can display a moving image while also detecting movement directly in front of it. Tracking a person's eye movements while she looks at the screen could allow for eye-tracking control: instead of using hand controls or another form of input, a user could flip through menu options on a screen by looking at the right part of the screen. The researchers envisage eventually integrating the screen with an augmented-reality system. [...]

Eye-tracking technology is nothing new, of course. Over the years, researchers have developed a number of systems that follow a person's gaze to allow him or her to interface with a computer. Often, the applications are for physically impaired people, but they can also be designed for a general computer user. [...]

The researchers built the system by first designing a light-sensing chip, which features a pattern of evenly spaced photodetectors. This was then fabricated at a commercial semiconductor manufacturing facility. A wafer containing multiple chips was then placed in a deposition chamber, where layers of organic material were deposited in between the photodetectors. These layers make up the organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs, that create the display. The mosaic of photodetectors and OLEDs is then encapsulated in a thin polymer film to protect it. [...]

The camera in the researchers' current prototype is still fairly rudimentary. It has a resolution of only 12 pixels, which means that it can't yet track a user's eye movements. However, Scholles says that the team has developed a 160-by-120-resolution version of the camera chip that has been tested in the lab, but not yet integrated with a display. The researchers expect to have an advanced version of the system, complete with higher-resolution camera and full eye-tracking capability, by early 2011."

Source

Fastest Camera Yet

Scientists have made the fastest camera ever. It can take 6.1 million pictures in a single second, at a shutter speed of 440 trillionths of a second. Light itself moves just a fraction of a centimeter in that time. The camera works by illuminating objects with a laser that emits a different infrared frequency for every single pixel, allowing them to custom-amplify a signal that would otherwise be too dim to see. [...]

“We have invented a new type of imaging technology that overcomes the fundamental limitation between sensitivity and speed,” said Keisuke Goda, an optoelectronic specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s the world’s fastest camera.” High shutter speeds enable moving objects to be clearly photographed. The less time a camera’s optical eye is open, the less time a subject has to move. But this comes at a price: less light enters the camera, causing the image to be underexposed. That’s why sports photographers use high-powered strobe lights. Workarounds include the use of extra-sensitive chemicals in traditional films, or amplification of signals captured by the photoelectronic light sensors of digital cameras. But film is relatively limited in its range, as are digital cameras. At the speed of Goda’s camera, there isn’t enough light to magnify. [...]

When reflected light hits the camera’s sensor, each pixel picks up its dedicated wavelength, and is given an electronic boost of a matching wavelength. That amplifies the original dim signal, composed of just a few photons, until it becomes visible. This can’t be done in a conventional digital camera, because the sensor doesn’t know what the original wavelengths were. [Wired]

Media Center In A Headset

A new headset from Nikon, released in Japan, is a completely self-contained entertainment center. Media-playback software and up to eight gigabytes of memory are built in, and with two AA batteries installed, the headset weighs less than a pound. According to Nikon, the adjustable eyepiece simulates a 50-inch TV screen viewed from about 10 feet away. The key to the picture quality is a light-diffraction grating that emerged from the company's research on camera lens design. Data can be loaded onto the headset through either a USB cable or a Wi-Fi connection. [Source]

My Eye Is A Camera

A one-eyed documentary filmmaker is preparing to work with a video camera concealed inside a prosthetic eye, hoping to secretly record people for a project commenting on the global spread of surveillance cameras. Canadian Rob Spence's eye was damaged in a childhood shooting accident and it was removed three years ago. Now, he is in the final stages of developing a camera to turn the handicap into an advantage. [...]

With the camera tucked inside a prosthetic eye, he hopes to be able to record the same things he sees with his working eye, his muscles moving the camera eye just like his real one. Spence said he plans to become a "human surveillance machine" to explore privacy issues and whether people are "sleepwalking into an Orwellian society."  [...]

His special equipment will consist of a camera, originally designed for colonoscopies, a battery and a wireless transmitter. It's a challenge to get everything to fit inside the prosthetic eye, but Spence has had help from top engineers, including Steve Mann, who co-founded the wearable computers research group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. [...]

Spence, who jokingly calls himself "Eyeborg," told reporters at a media conference in Brussels that the camera hidden in a prosthetic eye — the same pale hazel color as his real one — would also let him capture more natural conversations than he would with a bulky regular camera. "As a documentary maker, you're trying to make a connection with a person," he says, "and the best way to make a connection is through eye contact."" [Source]

Comparing iPhoto and Google Face Recognition

Face recognition starts with face detection. The face is then rotated so that the eyes are level and scaled to a uniform size. Next, one of three different technical approaches kicks in. Each of these approaches is, of course, covered by its own set of patents and bundled into various vendor offerings. One approach transforms the face into a mathematical template that can be stored and searched; a second uses the entire face as a template and performs image matching. And a third approach attempts to create a 3-D model based on the face, and then performs some kind of geometric matching. Based on our experience with the software, we believe that Apple's system is using a landmarks approach, while the Google system is doing some kind of image matching. But we could be wrong. Neither company has publicized which algorithms it is using. [...]

Overall, iPhoto does a surprisingly good job finding a bunch of photos of the person you've selected and "named." But in the process, it finds photos of other people as well. So your next task is to tell iPhoto which photos it got right and which are wrong. iPhoto uses this information to update its mathematical models. It then looks back through your photo library for other photos of the same person. If it can't find any, you can manually point one out to give iPhoto another starting point; it will then seek out more. You can also click on a photo and ask iPhoto to try to figure out who is in the picture; if you confirm iPhoto's guess, the model gets better still. [...]

Google's Picasa technology is far creepier. Instead of starting with a photo of someone you know and searching for all the similar matches, Google takes every photo that you've uploaded to Picasa, searches them all for faces, then "clusters"these faces into groups of, supposedly, the same people. You then go through each group and tell Google who a person is--including his or her full name, nickname, and e-mail address. [...]

But what's really unsettling about Google's service is that it doesn't just stop at your friends. Before you know it, Google is asking you to identify all those other faces in your photographs--the people standing in the background, the faces in the crowds, even the faces on posters. This is certainly keeping with Google's corporate mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." But is that what we really want from a photo-sharing website?" [Technology Review]

180—Degree Surveillance Cam

To cover a 180° field of view, most surveillance cameras either swivel on remote-­controlled mounts, which means they can miss suspicious activity, or use fish-eye lenses, which can introduce distortions. A new camera stitches images from five inexpensive, fixed sensors--the same kind used in camera phones--into a single, undistorted 180° picture. The Ethernet-connected device is the size of a light switch and transmits video at 15 frames per second, along with a seven-megapixel still image every second or two. [Source]

Flexi-cam For Home Hunting

Milwaukee may have designed it to help home inspectors spot hidden mold or shoddy repairs, but the M-Spector is just too much fun to leave to the pros. Did your 5-year-old really drop your diamond ring down the sink — or pawn it for Fruit Roll-Ups? Want to find out the easy way how many bananas your "hilarious" brother-in-law stuffed in your tailpipe? Grab the M-Spector, thumb the power button, and the 2.5-inch screen lights up with 320x240-pixel color video, transmitted from the tiny CMOS camera on the end of its flexible neck. A camera-mounted LED illuminates dark and dismal places, letting you see anywhere you can cram the 3-foot-long cable. Sure, cops could use the M-Spector to peer around corners or ferret out shanks in prison cells, but it's equally effective at locating the perfectly good grape that rolled under your fridge. Just don't get too creative; you'll probably want to draw the line at home colonoscopies. [Source]

My Eye Is A Camera

Rob Spence looks you straight in the eye when he talks. So it's a little unnerving to imagine that soon one of his hazel-green eyes will have a tiny wireless video camera in it that records your every move.

The eye he's considering replacing is not a working one -- it's a prosthetic eye he's worn for several years. Spence, a 36-year-old Canadian filmmaker, is not content with having one blind eye. He wants a wireless video camera inside his prosthetic, giving him the ability to make movies wherever he is, all the time, just by looking around.

"If you lose your eye and have a hole in your head, then why not stick a camera in there?" he asks.

Spence, who calls himself the "eyeborg guy," will not be restoring his vision. The camera won't connect to his brain. What it will do is allow him to be a bionic man where technology fuses with the human body to become inseparable. In effect, he will become a "little brother," someone who's watching and recording every move of those in his field of vision.

If successful, Spence will become one of a growing number of lifecasters. From early webcam pioneer Jennifer Kaye Ringley, who created JenniCam, to Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell, to commercial lifecasting ventures Ustream.tv and Justin.tv, many people use video and internet technology to record and broadcast every moment of their waking lives. But Spence is taking lifecasting a step further, with a bionic eye camera that is actually embedded in his body. [...]

Spence lost his right eye at 13 while playing with his grandfather's gun on a visit to Ireland. "I wanted to shoot a pile of cowshit," he says. "I wasn't holding the gun properly and it backfired, causing a lot of trauma to the eye." [...]

Even in the age of miniaturization, getting a wireless video camera into a prosthetic eye isn't easy. The shape of the prosthetic is the biggest limitation: In Spence's case, it's 9-mm thick, 30-mm long and 28-mm high.

While that might seem like plenty of room in an age when digital cameras are squeezed into unimaginably slim and compact phones, it actually isn't. The average area available inside a prosthetic eye for an imaging sensor is only about 8 square mm, explains Phil Bowen, an ocularist who is working with Spence. Also, a digital camera has many more components than the visible lens and the sensor behind it, including the power supply and image-processing circuitry. Getting a completely self-contained camera module to fit into the tiny hollow of a prosthetic eye is a significant engineering challenge. [...]

Then there's the question of how the prosthetic eyeball (the outer shell for the camera) will be made. The eyeball chassis has to close shut and be watertight.

Traditional prosthetic eyes are single pieces made with polymethyl-methacrylate (PMMA), a flexible polymer that is also used in dentures. To fit a camera in, Bowen redesigned the prosthetic eye into two pieces that could snap shut.

But with a camera inside there's something new to worry about. The modified prosthetic eye will be heavier than traditional ones and that could affect the eye socket, says Bowen. "The weight might stretch out the lower lid," he says, potentially disfiguring the face.

Assuming the size, weight and water-tightness issues can be solved, Spence has a vague idea of how he thinks it can work. A camera module will have to be connected to a transmitter inside the prosthetic eye that can broadcast the captured video footage. To boost the signal, he says he can wear another transmitter on his belt. A receiver attached to a hard drive in a backpack could capture that information and then send it to another device that uploads everything to a web site in real time. [...]

Spence is not the only one attempting to implant a video camera in his eye socket -- artist Tanya Vlach is working on a similar project -- but if he's successful he will be more than just another cyborg. The documentary film he's making about his efforts, plus the experience of living with a video camera in his eye, could help build greater awareness about the culture of surveillance in our society today, he says.

"No one is going to ban surveillance cameras," says Spence. "It's more about being aware of it. It's about giving a shit in the first place." [Wired] [Thanks Brian Alexander]

3D TV

According to industry estimates, there are already some two million television sets in homes that are ready to show 3-D video. The only problem is that there aren't a lot of 3-D broadcasts ready to roll. At this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, however, electronics and 3-D production companies are showing off the potential of 3-D content with the hope that in-home 3-D television will be mainstream within a couple of years.

The experience of watching a movie in 3-D has changed significantly over the past few decades. Gone are the red and blue cardboard glasses that meld two different images together and often distort on-screen colors. Directors and cinematographers have also learned to avoid gimmicks, like a pie in the audience's face, and are trying to use the extra dimension to tell the story better. Many new televisions are already shipping with software and hardware that supports 3-D, and some early adopters are taking advantage of the technology with video games.

Mitsubishi, Samsung, Panasonic, Sony, and JVC will all be showing off 3-D products at CES. Companies including RealD and Dolby have developed technology that provides the correct visual information to the left and right eye using polarizing lenses that filter two differently polarized versions of video footage to their respective eyes. By contrast, old 3-D movies used a method called anaglyph in which the film for one eye is dyed red and the other blue, while red-and-blue-tinted lenses filtered the appropriate version for each eye.

Mitsubishi and Samsung, for instance, have developed televisions that synchronize with another type of glasses that use shutters synchronized with the timing of the film's frames and an infrared cue from the display source. For this to work, television must operate at a frequency of at least 120 hertz so that the left-eye and right-eye information can each receive 60-hertz signals.

Philips has offered a display that bypassing the glasses altogether. Its 3-D television plays specially created videos that contain two frames for each scene, one with color information, and the other with grayscale depth information. Lenses on the screen itself project these slightly different images to the left and right eyes, creating the illusion of depth. [...]

The movie industry has already tackled some of the biggest production and postproduction challenges by building effective 3-D camera rigs and software for cleaning up the artifacts that arise when a movie is shot with two separate cameras. (See "Making a Modern 3-D Movie.") People are becoming more accustomed to seeing movies in 3-D, Hartney says. "Now the question is, how do we translate that into home?" [...]

But in-home 3-D also faces a significant technical challenge: twice as much information is needed (one video image for each eye), so footage has to be compressed before broadcast. This means developing standards to ensure a uniform viewing experience across types of displays. "There are a handful of companies working on [compression] formats," says Hartney, including Sensio and TDV. "They're trying to be compatible with existing televisions . . . to convert 2-D to 3-D for broadcast." Source: Technology Review

Lens Collects Broadband Satellite Signals

Technology Review reports on a new lens that can be mounted on, say, the top of a moving train to gather and distribute broadband signals from satellites. Internet access can make a train trip far more productive and enjoyable. But train-mounted satellite dishes that send and receive data can't be used on a lot of routes, as the standard hardware is too big to fit in some tunnels. Now researchers at the University of York, in England, have developed an alternative: a dome-shaped plastic lens that's less than half as high as a typical satellite dish. [...]   

With a traditional satellite system, a separate dish is required for each satellite, and the whole dish has to move to track the signal. Moving an entire dish is fine if it's mounted on a stable structure, such as the roof of a house, but not if it's affixed to the side of a train that's running through tunnels and under bridges. A lot of room is required around the device at all times, to ensure that it doesn't hit something while tracking a signal.

With Thornton's device, incoming radiation bounces off the surface on which the lens is mounted. The lens concentrates the reflected radiation to a single point on its surface, where it's collected by a motorized antenna called a feed. To track the signal, only the feed needs to move, as opposed to the entire dish in a conventional system. Moreover, several feeds can roam around the surface of the lens at once, collecting signals from satellites in different locations. [...]

Thornton says that 3G currently doesn't have the kind of geographic coverage required for continuous Internet access along train routes. Upgrades to the cell network, he says, tend to be concentrated in towns. "Each base station can only offer the highest data rates to users typically one or two kilometers away, so a truly vast number would be needed to cover all the railway routes in a country the size of the USA, or even France," Thornton says."

Seadragon for iPhone

It's now possible to see giga-pixel images on the iPhone, thanks to none other than Microsoft. In their first app for the iPhone, Microsoft is making available a version of their Seadragon technology.

As their Live Labs site notes, Seadragon Mobile brings the same smooth image browsing you get on the PC to the mobile platform. Get super-close in on a map or photo, with just a few pinches or taps of your finger. Browse an entire collection of photos from a single screen. You can browse Deep Zoom Images that you can create from your own pictures or your Photosynth collection (or anybody else's).

Seadragon Mobile is available for free at the iTunes App Store."

Cnet notes that engineers in Microsoft's Live Labs have released the company's first application for Apple's popular smartphone--even before making it available on Microsoft's own mobile platform. Seadragon Mobile, which was added to Apple's App Store on Saturday, is a free image-browsing app that allows users to quickly "deep zoom" images while online and is intended to demonstrate what is possible with a mobile platform.

Seadragon is the backbone for Microsoft's Photosynth, which allows users to take a grouping of photographs and stitch them together into a faux 3D environment.

Other iPhone apps are reportedly in development in Redmond; Microsoft's Tellme unit was expected to release the company's first iPhone app in the form of a voice-activated search for a variety of phones, including iPhone and BlackBerry. A Microsoft representative told my colleague Ina Fried in September that a public version of that program would likely be released in a few months."

Italian Mafia's Mobile Phone Gun

The BBC reports that a gun disguised as a mobile phone has been discovered by police in Italy.

The .22 calibre weapon was found during an early morning raid on a property near Naples.

Officers also seized bullet proof vests, drugs, ammunition and thousands of pounds in cash.

It was all part of an operation against the Camorra, the Naples-based mafia.

Fully loaded, the gun's capable of firing four shots in quick succession through the antenna using buttons on the keypad as the trigger.

One man was arrested by detectives but others are thought to have escaped."

Battlefield Camera You Throw Like A Grenade

Makes sense: toss this grenade-like camera into a battlefield situation, then watch it unfold to send back a panoramic picture.

Dubbed the I-Ball the wireless device is robust enough to survive being thrown onto a battlefield. The I-Ball's internal camera gives a 360 degree view, with images being sent from the instant it is launched. It is thought the new technology would enable soldiers to see into potential danger spots without putting themselves at risk of ambush.

The ball can be fired from a grenade launcher - or thrown into a room - giving troops vital information of who - or what - is on the ground or around the corner. Inside the sphere are image sensors and two fish-eye lenses. The data is then sent back and remapped through a type of processor known as a Field Programmable Gate Array which compensates for spin and tumble and then displays a true 360 image in real time." [BBC]

Paparazzo Envy: Longing To Be Hounded

For many the growth of paparazzi culture is an index of our celebrity obsession; but if you are actually among the celebrity obsessed paparazzi may actually engender a certain allure: "Wouldn't it be great to have someone follow me!"

So, naturally young lads pop up volunteering to do exactly that. For a hefty fee, which, no doubt, is part of this perverse pleasure. Sonia Zjawinski reports in Wired on the pleasure of having a long lens trail her around for a day of self-financed narcissism. Dressed in jeans and a camo hoodie, her everyday blandness now signals a celebrity in disguise, caught in moments of simulated naturalness as she emerges from a Starbucks. Plus, when it's all over she gets her pictures published in Wired—ironies abound.

We live in the age of the candid snapshot. People don't want to pose for glamour photos; they want artful images that look unstaged and off-the-cuff, like a party pic from TheCobrasnake.com or a tousled cover model on Vice magazine. But calculated spontaneity is hard to pull off without the help of a professional. And I wanted some pics of me that say "I look awesome even when I'm not trying." That's where Izaz Rony comes in. The 22-year-old, who credits YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook as inspirations, does guerrilla-style photo shoots for $500 an hour and up. It's like hiring a stalker for a day.

After setting up a shoot with Rony, I email him some recent snapshots so he'll recognize me. I also supply a vague itinerary of my plans for the following Sunday, leaving it fairly open — I want to act the part of a harried celeb with TMZ on my trail.

When the day arrives, I'm a mess. What do you wear to be photographed by your very own paparazzo? I don't want to look like I'm going to the Oscars, but I can't rock my everyday grungy freelancer garb. I try on 15 different outfits before settling on the right pair of jeans, then I make sure my hair has that perfect slept-in look.

I finally make it out of the apartment, and it's not long before I catch that glimpse of my stalker. I suddenly become hyperaware of myself. Do I look authentic? Am I being spontaneous enough? My nose is running, but I'm afraid to wipe it; a shutter-click at the wrong moment might look like I'm picking my nose or nursing a huge coke habit. Will my friends warn me if I have a latte-foam mustache? Do I make funny faces when I talk? Do Lindsay and Britney spend every waking moment worrying about this stuff?

I leave the coffee shop with Rony trailing unobtrusively. I'm beginning to understand why celebrities go nuts, shave their heads, and bounce in and out of rehab; I would, too, if I had relentless photographers on my tail 24/7. When I stop to peruse a pair of shoes at an outdoor stall, Rony snaps away at me through a rack of dresses, startling a fellow shopper. "Sorry," I sheepishly explain. "That's, uh ... my photographer."

I don't feel like a celebutante hounded by the media anymore; I feel like the lamest lame-o in Phonytown. And I've had enough of it. I call off the shoot.

For days, I'm afraid to look at the disc that Rony burns for me — 60 images in all. But surprisingly, I end up liking them. I actually look like my authentic self. They may not be worthy of the cover of Us Weekly, but they are perfect for posting on MySpace. I can only hope that people who visit my profile don't pick up on the $500-an-hour fee and stress-filled day of paranoia and humiliation."

Yosemite Extreme Pano Project

Report on monster panos being used for research: When geologists wanted a better look at a Yosemite rock face in years past, they only had one option: climb the cliff.

But now, thanks to super-high resolution gigapixel images created by a team of 70 photographers using GigaPan robotic imagers and a laser-mapping airplane, park geologist Greg Stock now has unprecedented access to the geological features of one of the world's most famous parks. And all from the comfort of his laptop. [...]

...intended to help Stock catalog and understand dangerous rock slides in Yosemite. Printed out at magazine-quality 300 dpi resolution, the photos stretch uninterrupted for 40 feet. [...]

Scientists have long used advances in photographic techniques to aid in their observations and discoveries. In fact, the image compositing technology built into the GigaPan was initially developed by NASA to help image other planets in our solar system. Ultimately, projects like this underscore the fact that photographs can be data as easily as they can be art.

The Yosemite project, which was launched and completed this summer, is already paying scientific dividends. Stock used the system to help his investigation of a rock slide that flattened a group of cabins near Glacier Point earlier this month. [...]

In the long-term, it's possible that the new photographic evidence could help geologists forecast when rock falls or avalanches are likely to occur. [...]

Using LIDAR, as its known, lets scientists "see through" vegetation and look at the bare ground on which its growing. "There is a laser in the belly of the plane and it flies back and forth over the landscape," Stock explained. "What you get is a digital topographic map of the surface that has the precision of a few centimeters."

On top of that map, xRez's Eric Hanson is draping the gigapixel photographic images over digital topographic maps, allowing him to virtually fly through a near-perfect model of the Yosemite valley.

"We're trying to use some of these techniques that have only been used in entertainment and apply them in scientific visualization," said Hanson, who had previously provided special effects for Spiderman, The Chronicles of Narnia, and a host of other Hollywood blockbusters.

The next step for Stock will be to start using the images to do some quantitative comparisons between before-and-after high-resolution photographs." [via Wired]

DARPA Hopes To Peer Into Hi-Rise Buildings

Report on new look-in sensing from Wired. Darpa, the Defense Department's way-out research arm, is looking to develop a suite of tools for "external sensing deep inside buildings." The ultimate goal of this Harnessing Infrastructure for Building Reconnaissance (HIBR) project: "reverse the adversaries' advantage of urban familiarity and sanctuary and provide U.S. Forces with complete above- and below-ground awareness."

By the end of the project, Darpa wants a set of technologies that can see into a 10-story building with a two-level basement in a "high-density urban block" -- and produce a kind of digital blueprint of the place. Using sensors mounted on backpacks, vehicles, or aircraft, the HIBR gear would, hopefully, be able to pick out every room, wall, stairway, and basement in the building -- as well as all of the "electrical, plumbing, and installation systems." [...]

It appears that the agency wants these HIBR gadgets to be able to track the people inside these buildings, as well. Why else would these sensors be required to "provide real-time updates" once U.S. troops enter the building? Perhaps there's more about the people-spotting tech, in the "classified appendix" to HIBR's request for proposals.

There are already a number of efforts underway, both military and civilian, to try to see inside buildings. The Army has a couple of hand-held gadgets that can spot people just on the other side of a wall. Some scientists claim that can even catch human breathing and hearbeats beyond a barrier.

Darpa's Visibuilding program uses a kind of radar to scan structures. The problem isn't sending the radio frequency (RF) energy in. It's "making sense of the data produced from all the reflected signals" that come back, Henry Kenyon wrote in a recent Signal magazine article. Besides processing data from the inside a structure, the system also must filter a large amount of RF propagation in the form of randomly reflected signals. Although radar technologies exist that can track people in adjacent rooms, it is much more difficult to map an entire building. “Going through one wall is not that bad, but a building is basically an RF hall of mirrors. You’ve got signals bouncing all over the place,” Darpa program manager Dr. Edward J. Baranoski says. Field trials are supposed to get underway this fall."

Tin Eye

A new search engine, TinEye, is out that's dedicated to finding images on the web. You upload your picture to their server, and on the basis of its image analysis—its "digital fingerprint"—the software goes looking for matches all over the web. They have crawled about a half billion images to date, and are looking to extend that considerably in the future.

The visual matching system can find cropped elements of a picture, and even ones that have been creatively "mixed." Plus, the site gives you an immediate visual comparison between your original search target image and what they have found.

First use for me: tracking down visual elements that I have downloaded but not really properly notated. What a great way to find authors...and abusers.

Digital SLRs With Hi-Def Video: An Overview

With the debut of new digital SLRs from Nikon and Canon that feature digital video, Wired offers an overview of what it all means:

For the first time, professional-grade single-lens reflex cameras are gaining the ability to record high-definition video. That capability, photographers say, has the potential to transform both still photography and moviemaking -- and it's largely thanks to advances in the semiconductor technology used to make the image sensors inside these cameras. [...]

While compact digital cameras have had video-recording capabilities for years, the image quality provided by these cameras has been disappointing because of their small image sensors and comparatively poor, miniaturized optics. High-end video and movie cameras produce top-notch HD video and their interchangeable lenses give filmmakers the creative control they crave, but the cameras are big and expensive. Even the RED ONE, a super-high-definition movie camera that records digital video that's comparable in quality to that of film stock, rings up at about $17,000. That's a bargain compared to movie cameras, but it's still a lot of dough for most people.

By contrast, the 21-megapixel Canon 5D Mark II, which shoots 1080p HD video, will cost $2,700 (plus the cost of lenses) when it becomes available later this year. The 12-megapixel, highly rated Nikon D90, which records 720p HD video and is available now, costs even less: a mere $1,300 gets you the body plus a basic zoom lens. [...]

Low-light sensitivity will lead moviemakers to dispense with expensive, bulky, and obtrusive lighting equipment, shooting their movies entirely with available light.

In addition, the new cameras are small compared to professional video cameras, enabling photographers to shoot in a variety of situations with relative ease. Laforet, for instance, shot a demonstration video using the Canon camera over the course of a weekend, incorporating shots that required him to lean out of the open door of a helicopter.

The key to the Nikon's and Canon's incredible image quality lies with the large image sensors they contain. Whereas a typical compact camera might have an image sensor measuring about 5mm by 7mm, the sensor on a "full frame" SLR like the Canon 5D Mark II is the same size as a frame of standard camera film: 24mm by 36mm. That's a more than 24-fold increase in image area. (The Nikon D90 uses a smaller 16mm by 24mm sensor, but even that is 11 times the area of a compact camera's imaging chip.) [...]

The increased size of the SLR's sensor allows each individual pixel to be larger, reducing the amount of "noise" in the image and increasing the amount of light each pixel is able to capture. The result: Dramatically better images, even at the same or lower number of megapixels, especially in low light.

A larger sensor also means it's easier for photographers to control the depth of field. Compact cameras have short focal-length lenses to match their small sensors. The laws of optics dictate that these lenses have a large depth of field. [...]

So why has it taken so long for digital SLRs to add video-recording capabilities? The answer has to do partly with the physical design of SLRs, and partly with the type of imaging chips used.

Inside every SLR is a flip-up mirror that directs light either to the viewfinder or to the image sensor, but not both at the same time. In order to record video (or provide a live image on the LCD), the camera has to "lock up" the mirror, blocking the viewfinder. The pros who until recently defined the digital SLR market were initially loathe to do that because of the better optical quality afforded by the viewfinder. [...]

But perhaps the most critical component of the new generation of cameras is the imaging chips inside.

For most of the past decade, consumer cameras have used a kind of imaging chip technology known as charge-coupled device (CCD). Recently, a competing imaging technology known as complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) has come to the fore, largely because of its lower power requirements. CMOS chips appeared first in SLR cameras aimed at the high end of the market and have only recently started appearing in point-and-shoot cameras, which are still dominated by CCD technology. What drove the transition to CMOS was the large sensor size of SLRs. [...]

But CMOS chips initially had trouble delivering live video images due to overheating, the need to come up with a way of resampling images on the fly (converting them from the sensor's maximum capacity to the smaller resolution of HD video) and other problems.

It wasn't until 2006 that Olympus first offered a digital SLR with a "live view" option, which kept the imaging chip in constant use while delivering a live image to the LCD. The feature proved popular, and other manufacturers soon followed suit.

Once they'd added live view, it was a small step for manufacturers to add the ability to record the video coming off the sensor instead of merely directing it to the screen on the back of the camera.

Now, experts say, CMOS imaging technology is developing much faster than CCD, partly because CMOS imaging chips are built with the same basic processes used in producing other kinds of semiconductors, like memory chips and processors. CCDs, by contrast, are less familiar to the majority of semiconductor engineers.

And thanks to Moore's Law, the power and speed of semiconductor technology keeps increasing exponentially. That means CMOS image sensors are getting better and better, incorporating more sophisticated noise compensation, shrinking the size of the gaps between each light-gathering pixel that are devoted to wiring and other electronics, and adding image and video processing features to the chips themselves."

Ballistic Cameras

In the near future, a soldier who needs a quick look over the next hill will be able to aim his rifle skyward, fire a grenade-sized reconnaissance device and instantly receive imagery on his pocket computer," writes Defense News' Barbara Opall-Rome. [...]

Grunts just fire the disposable "ballistic cameras" from "standard-issue M203 grenade launchers attached to M16 or other assault rifles," and then wait for the pictures to come back, 8 seconds and 600 meters later. In this way, the ballisitc cameras a lot like the pint-sized drones which have become so popular among American company commanders in Iraq. [...]

Eyes in the sky keep soldiers from getting killed. "The way you used to get intel on the battlefield was you fought for it, sending your squad into a building, forcing your way in," says former Army captain Phillip Carter. Now company commanders can see around corners and over hills - a God's-eye perspective that once was the domain of generals, with their Predators, manned spy planes, and satellites. [...]

The Ravens are simple to use -- one of the best-known operators is a cook. But, with no guidance system to operate, the ballistic cameras would be easier still: "point and shoot," to use a cliche. Which means the ability to see a battlezone from above could shift from a general to a captain to a buck private, rifle in hand." [Source. Link from Media Mike.]

Pano Proof Of Concept

The link below is to an experiment in mixing a photo pano with a video 180-degree video move along a track. Be sure to try all of the move tools at the top; simply dragging with your mouse will produce something like a Quicktime-VR which, by now, has become well within the compass of the expected.

Quite cool. Try it here.

Camera For The Blind

Well, actually this is a design prototype not yet in production. But what a good idea:

“Touch Sight is a revolutionary digital camera designed for visually impaired people. Simple features make it easy to use, including a unique feature which records sound for three seconds after pressing the shutter button. The user can then use the sound as reference when reviewing and managing the photos. Touch Sight does not have an LCD but instead has a lightweight, flexible Braille display sheet which displays a 3D image by embossing the surface, allowing the user to touch their photo. The sound file and picture document combine to become a touchable photo that is saved in the device and can be uploaded to share with others–and downloaded to other Touch Sight cameras.” [Link]

Removable 3D Screen Overlay

BBC reports that a company called Spatial View has developed lenticular panels which clip onto the front of a screen. The panels work with software which tracks the viewer's position and attempts to then provide the viewer with a 3D image. The lenticular system has been around for a while, normally seen on 3D postcards.

"The disadvantage of lenticular in the past has been that you have to stay very fixed in front of your screen but with our new eye tracking software we are able to remove this disadvantage," Claus Kessler from Spatial View says.

Spatial View is making new removable 3D display overlays, delivering glasses-free 3D viewing of gaming, entertainment, and professional content on notebook PCs, media players, and smart phones.

Spatial View's new 3D overlay offers a variety of live-action and animated 3D content including;

* A glasses-free 3D music video, where the full depth and movement of the performers are experienced and delivered on a notebook display;

* Animated content that pops out of the screen and provides amazing depth of field;

* Fly-over images that feature moving clouds, protruding mountain peaks, and other topographical features in 3D;

* Professional 3D content that shows, rather than telling clients and customers, how products and technologies actually work.

Spatial View, a pioneer of multi-user glasses-free 3D, offers a series of affordable, high quality, auto-stereoscopic displays as well as an innovative software portfolio that enables the stereo display of 3D data of all types, in any 3D format, and on any stereo device. Spatial View's unique autostereoscopic software allows users to view 3D content without requiring special glasses. [Spatial View]