The world of digital photography is going through a fundamental technology change, but attendees at the 6Sight Conference, also got a glimpse into the cultural changes coming when a billion people worldwide have access to digital imaging. The two-day conference, attended by more than 200 thought-leaders, concludes today.
The conference, co-hosted by FutureImage, I3A and PMA, was about “changing the discourse” of imaging to the empowerment of people to use imagery in their every day life,” according to Alexis Gerard, founder and president of Future Image.
To broaden the concept of what a “camera” is, Dr. John Meyer, director, digital printing and imaging lab, HP Co., Palo Alto, Calif., displayed some innovative technologies coming from HP Labs. He described how hardware configurations, combined with mathematics, can create compelling human-like decision-making processes. For example, he showed a video of a wearable camera, providing a constant feed of images to a recording device. Normally, this would provide far too many images for anyone to deal with, but HP’s scientists use facial recognition and other algorithms to determine only those pictures that are significant. These pictures, then, could be combined into a photo book.
Dr. Paul Saffo, a strategist and author, suggested conference attendees delete the word “information” from their vocabularies, as it relates to imaging, to be replaced with “media.” Computers will enable consumers to experience their images interactively, as opposed to just passively viewing them. It’s this interactivity that is driving today’s markets. Google, for example, is an “interactive experience,” because nothing happens until the user puts in a search term. And it’s millions upon millions of these interactive experiences that built Google’s value.
Another highlight of the day was a demonstration by David Gedye, Group Manager, Microsoft Live Labs, of “Photosynth,” a compelling image-organization technology derived from Microsoft Corp.’s acquisition of Seadragon technology in 2005. The software uses “image tourism” to combine many different images of the same object – in Gedye’s example, it was Notre Dame cathedral -- from many sources, and then build a 3 dimensional interactive model of the object. According to Microsoft, the technology provides a “seamless zooming around collections of pictures and efficient multi-resolution streaming transport between clients and servers.”
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