On Jun 23, 2011, at 2:21 AM, P. J. Alling wrote: > The original hype around the Segway was that it was going to change personal > transportation forever. What it was was a technical tour d' force that in > reality changed almost nothing, it wasn't an anti gravity flying car or a > personal transportation system. The Segway was a device that couldn't do > anything a healthy person couldn't do walking, and in fact couldn't even go > cross country as well. This strikes me as the photographic equivalent. I > expect that there's more of a market for a camera built on these principals > as opposed to the Segway which is now the province of over weight rent-a-cops > and the US Postal service, more than anything else.
I've been doing some thinking about plenoptics and I don't see it as much the game changer in photography as I do in things like 3-d mapping. If you can do things like change the depth of field, you can also do things like calculate the distance to each point in the image. Imagine something like google's street view cars equipped with a version of this camera where each image can make a crude 3-d map of the buildings around the car, and then combining those images for a fairly high resolution 3-d map of a city, that is reasonably accurate at least at street level. Another potential use for it would be to get a good 3-D map of someone's body, so that when they order clothes they can be cut to fit, in the desired color and fabric, sewn at slave labor rates and then shipped to your doorstep. Likewise, realtors selling houses are already trying to do some sort of 360 degree images, one of these cameras could be used to get very good 3-d models of each room for virtual tours. Internal decorators, remodelers etc. could then modify those 3-d models to show their proposed changes. You'd have to set the camera up several places in each room with good differential gps, but you could probably fudge by figuring out what parts of the room correspond with each other, like you do stitching 2-d images. -- Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
