Well, I thought that it would be a little more time before we saw the temporal domain invaded by this much performance!

Because of the limitations trade offs that this extreme speed necessitates, I will not surprise me if there is a lot of panning of this offering.

This camera is very interesting to us at DarbeeVision, as the rate of capture could be fast enough to generate some very nice time-based DVn processing. We can defocus an subtract in the temporal domain with result that can those achieved by processing in the spatial domain.

As the www.dvnphoto.com software is limited to a monoscopic input for processing, so you would need the DVnPhoto Pro version (currently only available through private licensing) which is not available via download on our website.

Contact: russ@darbeevision.com

For details on how you can license DVnPhoto Pro. The DVn software that uses stereo input or multiplet input (spatial disparity and or temporal sequenced) .

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/technology/personaltech/03pogue.html?em&ex=1208318400&en=54f977256143540c&ei=5087%0A

A Camera for the Shot You Missed

When you’re a professional gadget reviewer, you see plenty of cellphones, music players, camcorders and computers. But in two weeks, Casio will offer an entirely new device for sale, the first of its kind: a time machine.

Now, the Exilim EX-F1 is not a time machine in the H. G. Wells sense. You can’t climb inside and travel back to high school and undo every humiliating mistake you’ve ever made.

But for a digital camera, the F1 comes pretty close. It does let you freeze time, slow time down and even capture photos of sudden events that you’ve already missed.

How is this possible? Because, for starters, the F1 ($1,000 list price) is the world’s fastest camera.

A typical shirt-pocket camera, if you’re lucky, can snap one photo a second in “burst mode.” A $1,000 semipro model will get you 3 shots a second. But this Casio can snap — are you ready for this? — 60 photos a second. These are not movies; these are full six-megapixel photographs, each with enough resolution for a poster-size print.

After such a burst, you’re offered three options: delete all 60 shots, keep all 60, or review them and pluck out the individual frames worth keeping. The whole batch begins to play like a flip-book movie; you control playback with a back-panel control dial. As you watch, you press the shutter button once to identify each frame you want to keep; the rest will be discarded.

You can parcel out the 60-shot maximum in different ways: 30 shots a second for two seconds, 20 for three seconds, 15 for four seconds, and so on. You can even adjust the firing rate in midshot by turning the lens barrel. (The camera’s menus let you choose what you want the lens ring to govern: zoom, focus or burst rate.)

So who would ever need to take so many pictures in one second? Sports fans, of course; imagine having the luxury of plucking out a photo of exactly the bat angle, soccer-leg swing or basketball jump height you want.

But there are many other times when you might like to isolate just the right split second: when your subjects are wildlife (including children), explosions, splashes, bouquet tosses, celebrity glimpses, broadening smiles and so on.

(As I experimented with the F1, I couldn’t help feeling that my great-uncle Harold Edgerton would have approved. He was the M.I.T. professor who, in the late 1930s, pioneered the art of high-speed photography: the bullet piercing an apple, the splash of a milk drop, and so on.)

The F1’s second trick is that business about photographing a moment after the fact. In pre-record mode, you half-press the shutter button when you’re awaiting an event that’s unpredictable: a breaching whale, a geyser’s eruption or a 5-year-old batter connecting with the ball. The camera silently, repeatedly records 60 shots a second, immediately discarding the old to make room for the new.

When you finally press the shutter button fully, the camera simply preserves the most recent shots, thus effectively photographing an event that, technically speaking, you missed.

Then there’s the motion detector. In this mode, you put the camera down on something steady, press the shutter button and back away. It sits there, waiting for hours if necessary, until it detects movement in the scene — at which point it auto-fires 60 burst shots. That could come in handy when you’re trying to photograph a hummingbird approaching a flower, a bird arriving at its nest or an unauthorized household member raiding the cookie jar.

As a final time trick, the F1 can display, on its 2.8-inch screen, a slow-motion version of what the camera is “seeing.” Your preview falls further and further behind real time — but you now have the luxury of patience as you decide precisely when to snap the shot.

The F1’s movie mode is one of the most powerful ever. It has stereo microphones, and even a jack for an external mike. It has separate triggers for stills and videos, so you can snap stills right in the middle of filming a movie. It can zoom in midmovie, a rarity in still cameras. And it can film in either standard or high definition; there’s even a mini-HDMI jack for connecting the camera straight to an HDTV set.

Most stunning of all, this camera can film at outrageously high frame rates: 300, 600, or even 1,200 frames a second. The result is incredibly smooth, extremely slow motion, like something in an Imax nature movie. No still camera has ever offered anything like this feature.

The downside, alas, is that at faster rates, you get smaller movies. At 1,200 frames a second, you’re dealing with a Triscuit-sized video in the center of your TV screen, surrounded by oceans of black margin.

(Page 2 of 2)

Still, when you’re trying to pinpoint problems with your golf swing, your tennis serve or your industrial equipment, slowing time down to this extent is like a keyhole into a previously invisible world. You might not care about the size of the keyhole.

Multimedia

Slide Show

Unfortunately, this highly unusual, almost experimental piece of equipment includes nearly as many downsides as breakthroughs.

First, even though it’s nearly as big and bulky as a digital S.L.R. like a Canon Rebel or Nikon D80, the F1 is, at its heart, an amateur camera. It contains a tiny light sensor (about half an inch diagonal, versus 1.1 inches in a beginner S.L.R.). As a result, its light sensitivity is poor. Except in bright sunlight or studio lighting, those burst-mode shots are often disappointingly dim or disappointingly blurry.

Casio was obviously aware of this weakness, and so it engineered one of the brightest and fastest flashes ever on a consumer camera: it can fire an amazing 7 times a second for up to 3 seconds. That superflash generally solves the light-sensitivity problem, but of course you might not want the characteristic harshness of flash photos.

There’s even a second “flash” right above the first — actually a very bright video-light L.E.D., which can maintain steady illumination on nearby subjects when the main flash’s 7 frames a second still isn’t fast enough. Clever.

But there are other problems. The eyepiece viewfinder is electronic (a tiny, relatively coarse video screen), not optical (pristine, see-through glass). Start-up is slow.

The 12X zoom is nice to have, but it’s slow to react. And during video capture, when you turn the lens ring to zoom, it jerks spastically through the zoom range, effectively ruining your shot. The camera has great difficulty changing focus during filming, too.

The F1 is also complicated. It has two different mode dials and two different “shutter” buttons (one for stills, one for video). All those high-speed features, and all the attendant settings, had to go somewhere.

There are long lists of limits, too. You can’t use the lens ring to zoom during high-definition filming. The flash won’t operate in pre-record mode. Face detection doesn’t work during video capture. There’s no sound in high-speed videos. You can’t change focus, zoom or exposure during high-speed filming. And so on.

Now, it does seem ungrateful to criticize such an astonishing camera; it’s like complaining that your 7-year-old violin virtuoso is lousy at sports.

But make no mistake: no camera has ever offered anything like the F1’s high-speed stills, high-speed videos or high-speed flash for anywhere near its price. Everybody who sees this camera in action winds up slack-jawed with disbelief.

Casio deserves congratulations for innovating in so many big, bold, industry-defying ways. Instead of pushing misleading metrics like megapixels, the company went its own defiant way and came up with a camera with an extremely clearly defined identity.

Maybe it’s not the time machine of sci-fi movies. But in the world of consumer electronics, it’s an eye-opening first step.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

I just couldn’t resist on this one!

Can you envision kids walking about, with “iPod AR” web enabled glasses that allow them to listen to their favorite tunes, while seeing and speaking to avatars that are enabled via Google and MySpace?

NEW Book

Augmented Reality: A Practical Guide – New from Pragmatic Bookshelf Learn How to Fuse Real & Virtual Reality

Augmented Reality: A Practical Guide, will show you how, and teach you about game development at the same time. You can run the included demos, or use the ARTag API to customize your own AR applications.

Co-author Stephen Cawood explains, “Augmented Reality is a natural way to explore 3D objects and data, as it brings virtual objects into the real world where we live, rather than forcing us to learn how to navigate inside the computer.”

AR uses video-see-through technology, using handheld devices such as tablet PC’s, PDA’s, or camera cell phones, or in many cases just a webcam and your standard computer monitor. You hold the device up and “see through” the display to view both the real world and the superimposed virtual object. You can move around and see the virtual object, model, animation, or game from different views as the AR system performs alignment of the real and virtual cameras automatically.

This book introduces you to Augmented Reality (AR), provides detailed explanations of how the technology works, and provides samples for you to try on your own. Code samples using the freely downloadable ARTag software SDK in C++ and C# are included; all you need is a computer, printer, and a webcam.

Create something new today!

Stephen Cawood is a former employee of Microsoft Corporation. Since leaving Microsoft, he has been writing full-time and has worked on a number of titles including The Unauthorized Halo 2 Battle Guide, Halo 2 Hacks (O’Reilly), and The Black Art of Halo Mods.

Mark Fiala is a computer vision researcher who has worked both in the academic world in computer vision and in industry doing electrical engineering. Mark grew up as a robotics hobbyist and pursued computer vision to make “eyes for robots.” However, he later discovered other uses for computer vision. Mark studied electrical and computer vision in Canada and took part in several startup companies in varied areas of telecom and panoramic imaging before working for four years in the Computational Video Group of Canada’s National Research Council. At the NRC, he applied computer vision to other areas including Augmented Reality.

Additional Resources: For more information about the book, including table of contents, index, author bios, and cover graphic, see: http://www.oreilly/catalog/9781934356036

Augmented Reality: A Practical Guide Stephen Cawood, Mark Fiala ISBN: 1-934356-03-4, 300 pages, $34.95, GBP21.99, EUR28.00

Josette Garcia O’Reilly UK Limited

CONTACT: Josette Garcia, O’Reilly UK Limited Tel: +44 (0)1252 711 776 e-mail: josette@oreilly.co.uk

M2 Communications Ltd disclaims all liability for information provided within M2 PressWIRE. Data supplied by named party/parties. Further information on M2 PressWIRE can be obtained at http://www.presswire.net on the world wide web. Inquiries to info@m2.com.

Johnny Lee is my next hero!

Although his work will us down an imaging/virtual reality/3D rabbit hole, it is such a great thing that he is sharing with the world.

There are few tools out there that are inexpensive and work in real time, for the exploration of 3D image space. Johnny has taken the $40 Wii remote and has created some very powerful applications for it.

I won’t dwell on trying to explain his Wii Remote Projects, because he does such a good job of it himself.

Keep going Johnny!! I am sure your work thus far, has inspired thousands of hopeful inventors.

-Larry

Here’s his website for the Wii Remote Projects

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/

Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the Wii Remote

Using the infrared camera in the Wii remote and a head mounted sensor bar (two IR LEDs), you can accurately track the location of your head and render view dependent images on the screen. This effectively transforms your display into a portal to a virtual environment. The display properly reacts to head and body movement as if it were a real window creating a realistic illusion of depth and space.

The program only needs to know your display size and the size of your sensor bar. The software is a custom C# DirectX program and is primarily provided as sample code for developers without support or additional documentation. You may need the most recent version of DirectX installed for this to work.

Software
To run the DesktopVR program you see in the video:
1. Connect your wiimote to your PC via Bluetooth. If you don’t know how to do this, you can follow this tutorial. I’ve been told it works with other Bluetooth drivers, but I have not tested them myself.
2. Download the WiiDesktopVR sample program. Read the README file on program usage and configuration. Launch the “WiiDesktopVR.exe” in the main folder. A potentially more stable/Vista/64-bit compatible version has been created by Andrea Leganza. There also may be more variants on the web.

NOTE: If you are having trouble with running the program, you can check my project blog post about it or check the forum for assistance. I am unable to replicate these problems, so it hard for me to debug them. But, other people have figured it out. Things that have been identified to help: delete the “config.dat” file and re-run the program, install a new version of Direct X, or istall .NET 2.0.

Developers Notes: The code is built on top of this Wiimote library. To compile the program, you will need a C# IDE and the DirectX SDK. More notes are in the README.

A visit to this project’s FAQ and Advanced Discussion post may be very englightening. You may also find the official discussion forums for my wiimote projects helpful: WiimoteProject.com

Welcome to DVn blogging!

We are going to find the best information about computational imaging from around the world and share it here.

Making images better, by using computing is the wave of the present and shows unlimited potential for the future development. We will see 2D and 3d image art and entertainment, morph into many new realms, most of which were a fantasy just 10 years ago. 2D imaging is becoming 2.5D, while 3D can become 3.5D. What a great time to live in!

Today, content creators and distributors are just beginning to find that there are a huge number of untapped ways to explore and express depth and vibrant realism. Each of which has inherent challenges and benefits.

SD TV content creators and distributors are pushing the envelope of post processing to make SD a more visually engaging experience. An experience that can better compete with the eye popping improvement of the HD image. SD on TV, has been pushing contrast, color, focus and scene composition into realms that would have been thought of as garish, just a few years ago. Watch some Nickelodeon and Cartoon channel on cable and you will see some amazing combinations of imaging techniques that are pushing the limits in great new ways.

Movies are going the same route and have huge challenges. I recently saw the “Transformers” movie in a DLP digitally equipt theatre. It was an astonishingly good presentation. Conversely, I saw an IMAX presentation of “Harry Potter – Order of The Phoenix” and I was less than impressed, due to what appeared to me as a very inconsistently successful attempt to harness a myriad of digital effects and processing. It led to what I would describe as a visual smorgashboard that had a lack of quality cohesiveness.

Computational imaging for all of “photography” capture and display is about to turn another corner. We can capture millions/billions of colors, we can display billions of colors. Additionally, now with multi-lensing, we can capture potentially billions of planes of image information that we can display in a virtually infinite number of display planes. What a challenge to content creators, as our new era of computational image content creation has been ushered in with an exponentional explosion of possibilities.

I am looking forward to depositing great information and look forward to your discussion on this blog.

Larry