Ratchet Up

[Seeing Double]

US firm Microvision [Download their brochure in PDF] has developed a system that projects lasers onto the retina, allowing users to view images on top of their normal field of vision. It could allow surgeons to get a bird's eye view of the innards of a patient, offer military units in the field a view of the entire battlefield and provide mechanics with a simulation of the inside of a car's engine.
The system uses tiny lasers, which scan their light onto the retina to produce the entire range of human vision. [...] "Seeing is believing and seeing these images floating in front of you at about arms length distance is pretty incredible."

The system has been years in the making and has only just come into commercial usage in the car industry, with Honda using it in its dealerships. [...]

The monocle is worn in front of the eye and reflects scanned laser light to the eye allowing mechanics to view car diagnostics and instructions superimposed on their field of vision. [...] Honda has found that technicians are saving about 40% in terms of the time spent working on engines, saving the company an estimated $2,000 per month per technician. [...]

There are four components to the system - electronics, light sources, scanners and optics.

1: Light projected to scanning mirror
2: Pupil expander enlarges the image
3: Lens focuses the image
4: Image reflected onto the retina
The electronics acquire and process signals from data or an image source, say a web page or a video camera. [...]

There is still work to be done but potentially the system could become second only to tapping into the optic nerve in terms of getting images to the brain. It could provide three dimensional pictures in perfect colour, able to simulate near or distant objects with complete realism, which could provide gamers with an intense sense of reality.

Within five years, such systems could be incorporated into mobile phones or hand-held computers and appear to the brain as a brightly lit widescreen TV version of what is on the device.

[More from the BBC] [Microvision]

[Visualizing the Brain]

Some fascinating visualizations of the brain and its sensory modalities. The one above form the Visible Human Project in Germany revels that many of us cerebrate with what looks suspiciously like sauteed eggplant.

Next, two images from the Picture Library at the Natural History Museum in London.

The first "shows what a man's body would look like if each part grew in proportion to the area of the cortex of the brain concerned with its movement."

The second "shows what a man's body would look like if each part grew in proportion to the area of the cortex of the brain concerned with its sensory perception."

[Communimage]

Communimage is a collaborative visual art project by Johannes Gees and partner "calc" that has been going since 1999. It's a massive digital mosaic consisting of 22,555 128-pixel images contributed by tens of thousands of people from around the world. If printed today, the composit image would measure 139 x 10 meters—a lot of real estate. [The image on the right dates from January, 2000, when they printed the whole for a gallery exhibition. It was much smaller then.]

In the upper right of the interface you'll see something that looks like a small country of images. Click to bring up a patch. You can zoom and move through Communimage with a variety of tools. Try using the "mover" at the top to move, MapQuest-style, to 6x6 displays contiguous to the one that's up. Take some time to navigate around, don't just click and run.

Info on the site says that every patch has an associated sound included by the author of each image. Rows of these sounds have been turned into melodies whose rhythms are determined by upload times.. Listen to a 30 second mp3. [I'm a little skeptical that 22K people have uploaded sound files and suspect a problem in translation, or more likely my own comprehension.]

What I particularly like here is the quality of the images. Every click on this map is a pleasure.

[Communimage]

More sobering is this collection of images from Iraq that don't have the typical press filters we're used to. [Via MetaFilter]

[iCare]

Researchers are developing a system that aims to provide a computerized "seeing" assistant that will help blind people read books, access Web pages, recognize faces and navigate unfamiliar rooms.

The portable system, called iCare, consists of a tiny camera mounted on a pair of glasses, a laptop carried in a backpack, a headset and a microphone. Designed by researchers at Arizona State and Wright State universities, ICare converts the images recorded by the camera to verbal messages conveyed to the user. [...]

Users can program iCare to feed them information continuously or only when prompted by a question, such as "What is directly in front of me?" or "Who just walked into the room?"

So far, iCare's greatest talent is its ability to translate type into spoken words. The iCare-Reader translates text into a synthesized voice using optical character recognition software and other software that compensates for different lighting conditions and orientations. [...] "It's as fast as a sighted person could read a book—this is one of the phenomenal things about it."

The iCare-Reader not only enables blind people to choose any book from the library shelf, but also allows them to check out a restaurant menu, the size marked on a shirt tag or the label on a soup can. [...]

The iCare-HumanRecognizer "has a high probability of recognizing people from its database—it compares the color of their hair, eyes, facial characteristics, and from this can know who it is," Bourbakis said. Currently, however, the system is only able to do this when the lighting is just right and the person is directly facing the camera [...]

The final module of the system helps blind people navigate unfamiliar territory. The iCare-SceneAnalyzer analyses the immediate environment and can convey information about where the nearest exit is, how far away obstacles are or how fast someone is walking across the room. [...] The system identifies objects by comparing the one viewed by the camera to those stored in its database.

[Wired]

[Old Thailand / New Thailand]

[New Scanning Technology Matches 35mm Negative]

There are reports of a new digitizing process that produces a 4000 line scan of a 35mm film frame that equals the original negative in density of information. John Lowry's digital scanning process can:

...make a DVD look nearly as sharp and detailed as a 35-millimeter film print. It will produce images with six times the resolution of today's high-definition television sets. In video quality, it could turn home theater into a true rival of the neighborhood cineplex.

Walk into the suites of Lowry Digital...and the first sight that strikes you is the computer bank — rack after rack of Macintosh G5 computers, 600 of them, holding a combined memory of 2,400 gigabytes. [...]

Beyond this room is a super-sanitized, temperature-controlled chamber. Inside, a technician wearing a white smock and cap monitors a pair of machines called the Imager XE-Advanced, made by the Imagica Corp.

The Imagica machines are ultra-sophisticated digital film-scanners. They are loaded with reels from the original negative of the 1967 James Bond movie "You Only Live Twice."

The spools advance slowly, one frame every four seconds, which is how long it takes the Imagica to scan across a frame 4,000 times — a process known as 4K scanning.

During the scan, the machine creates a digital replica of the frame, consisting of 4,000 horizontal lines of data. A cable then transmits this data to a hard-drive server in an adjoining room.

To put the magnitude of 4,000 lines in perspective, a television displays broadcast signals as 480 lines. High-definition televisions have up to 1,080 lines. (The greater number of lines, the more detailed the image — the more closely it resembles a seamless, lifelike picture.) Impressive as HDTV looks, 35-millimeter film has far more color and detail. Engineers calculate that 4,000 lines of data would be needed to reproduce all the visual information in a frame of film — exactly as many lines as the Imagica delivers.

So, if it scans an original camera negative, as it's doing with "You Only Live Twice," it creates a data file that's a virtual duplicate of the negative. [...]

The attraction of going this route is that it produces not just better-looking DVD's for now but a foundation for formats of the future. [...]

A hard-drive master that contains a 4K scan could serve the same function as a film negative — a source of copies, for whatever medium. Unlike film, it won't fade; and as video technology improves — as its resolution becomes higher and higher — there will be no need to make new masters; 4K is high enough to accommodate the changes.

"We're making an archive — for DVD, film, digital cinema, HDTV, TV, whatever — that will last the next two or three generations of technology," Mr. Lowry said. [...]

He has bought hundreds of computers, hired a staff of 30 and worked on 80 DVD's — including the long-awaited DVD of "Star Wars" — erasing wear, tears, dirt, scratches and other ravages of age. (In the early days, he sometimes erased too much. By his own admission, his restoration of "Citizen Kane" is too clean; the natural grain of film is gone; it looks like a video. He later figured out how to fix flaws while preserving grain.)

[Source]

[First Live 3D Sim-Church Has Arisen]

The first live 3D online Sim-Church is in the works, due to start spreading the Good Word next month. It's not a spoof, even though worshipers will look like Lego characters.

With pews made from pixels, the congregation logging in from their home computers and the collection sent in by mobile phone, the world's first 3D online church is going to be church like never before. [...] The initiative aims to make Christian worship accessible to web surfers who may never darken the doors of their local church. [...]

The first service from the online sanctuary will take place on the opening day of the UK's Christian Resources Exhibition (CRE). The service will be led by real priests or pastors who will appear on the screen in cartoon form. Using their keyboards and connected via the internet, they will move around the church, welcome the congregation, lead the service from a lectern, introduce hymns and preach from a pulpit to people sitting in rows of pews. [...]

'The congregation, too, will log on in different parts of the world—and see each other on screen,' says Jenkins. 'They'll choose a pew to sit in, introduce themselves to other worshippers through speech bubbles, sing a hymn, listen to the sermon, chat to each other afterwards, and perhaps pray together.

'They'll even be invited to put something on the collection plate—via SMS on mobile phones.'

Hundreds of invisible 'lurkers' will be able to watch the service as well, and participate in a chat room discussion afterwards.

'The full costs of creating the environment have still to be met,' says Simon Jenkins. 'So the project's future depends on finding enthusiastic sponsors. Long term, we hope to work with the established church in creating a structure that reflects the type of person attracted to the environment.'

[More]

["What Hath God Wrought?"]

Here's a kinky new marker for your Digital Culture timeline. The addition this year of a way to tap out the "@" symbol is the first change in Morse code in 60 years. On the qwerty keyboard, it's Shift-2. Or if you're tapping away on a traditional Morse code key, it's "dit-dah-dah-dit-dah-dit."

In 1844 Samuel F.B. Morse's first message—"What hath God wrought?"—zoomed instantaneously from Washing to Baltimore. It was the first instance of long-distance electronic communication. In a way, the telegraph was the first digital communication medium, since it's dots and dashes are a sonified form of ones and zeros. So in making it possible to key @, the head of the communications revolution has swallowed its tail.

But it's ironic that you have to work so hard in Morse code to telegraph @, particularly since @ was invented in modern times specifically for its ease on the keyboard. It's apparently more economical to send the word "at," which takes 9 beats, than it is to tap out "@," which takes 17. There has to be some gesture of Old School resistance there.

Charles Babbage invented his Analytical Engine, generally considered to be the first computer, in 1839, the same year Daguerre announced the invention of photography. Then telegraphy only five years later. Surely this fist of years has to be the hot zone of the communications revolution.

What hath God wrought?

[Phone-cam Grab Shots: Elevating And Preserving Or Capturing And Disposing?]

t's random out there in the cam-phone image boonies. Which seems to exemplify these thoughts from Doug Ruskoff on cam-phone image making:

When aficionados of the cameraphone equate its new popularity with the pop cultural status of the Kodak Brownie in the 1960's, I have to pause. While the Brownie did bring inexpensive photography to the masses, it brought it as a hobby - as something to do intentionally. Kids would go out with the Brownie and take pictures, for their own sake.

The cameraphone is terrific in that it gives us the ability to snag a photo whenever we want, even if we never carried a camera around, before. They certainly don't cost us anything in weight, and given how we already keep our phones in the most accessible pockets we've got, it costs us almost nothing in time to click off a few shots. And here we are passing digital photos around to one another like they were email signatures—moblogging them onto our websites or just passing our phones physically around our classrooms and workplaces to share the accident or sexy person we happened to capture.

But that's just the point: it's the photo we happened to capture. Instead of elevating the events in our lives to "memories," as we did in the Kodak era, we are simply grabbing some visual data points or a momentary sensation. The intentionality is gone. And unless the image is spectacular (not in execution, but in its content) we'll trash it without printing. Who can be bothered filing all those little jpegs? [...]

As photography becomes less time-consuming, less crafted, less intentional, and less expressed through physically realized artifacts, it will lose its ability to elevate the moments and subjects its captures. Just as monarchs established their nobility through time-consuming portraiture (for which they, themselves, were required to sit), people with film cameras could sanctify their loved ones, and - perhaps more importantly - measure and even control the passage of time by subjecting the moment to a carefully organized and meticulously processed exposure.

On the other hand, here's a monumental effort from Dan at "!Blog," a portrait of George Bush made from the faces of the soldiers who have died in Iraq.
 

[Old Cinema / New Cinema]

At the Sundance Film Festival in January, a small company from Vancouver helped present the wireless premiere of a high-definition feature film that will very likely be remembered as a groundbreaking moment in the rapidly evolving world of digital cinema. [...]

Each guest was given a wireless Sony notebook computer. And whenever they were ready, the presenters invited everyone to put on their headphones, click on their computers and sit back—or move around if they preferred—for the world premiere screening of November, a low-budget independent thriller starring Courteney Cox from the TV series Friends. [...]

This was not a satellite broadcast or download from the Internet. It was a brand new system of digital delivery. With a single click, the film was being distributed, on demand, directly to each computer from the Intel head office in Oregon. And look ma, no cables. Each person in the room was free to move around with their laptops, turn the movie off and on again, rewind or fast-forward at will. [...] In contrast to the jerky videos that are typically delivered via the Internet, the quality of this digital transmission was five times better than any available from a plugged-in connection at home. [...]

This year at Sundance, more than 40 per cent of the festival's 200-plus films were either shot on digital video or projected digitally. The audience has barely noticed the difference. [...]

"It will be like having a Blockbuster video store in your laptop..."You'll be able to download your personal movie to your personal handheld video player while waiting in line for a coffee, then go home and either watch it on the small screen in bed or plug the computer cable into a large display screen in your living room." [...]

Right now, Internet connections through fibre-optic cable lines limit digital distribution to urban communities with high-powered networks. [...] With wireless distribution, a single-screen theatre house in Moose Jaw would be able to receive the latest Hollywood release at the same time as a megaplex in Montreal.

[Globe and Mail]