July 17, 2003
Cameras as data collection devices
This I must read later. The site linked from Gizmodo seems down. Slashdotted? ;) But the original author seems to have very interesting things to say about the future of digital cameras.
I never really thought of it in this way (like with so many other objects that are "[everyday things http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385267746/104-7802387-1325515?vi=glance") but digital cameras don't have to be cameras.
A camera captures light. That is a historical fact, and something that has locked in our minds since the days of the first camera obscura. A digital camera however is a totally different device, a device that doesn't have to work like the human eye that the analog camera originally tried to mimick.
Cameras could record tempature. Or infrared energy. Or location with the help of GPS. Or signal from bluetooth devices or RFID tags. We could use our cameras to interpret barcodes. Or measure distance. (Rather...TELL us distance. Even film-based cameras used infrared and sonar signals to establish distance for focusing and exposure.) Right now, we've designed our cameras more or less to see like we see. Thanks to the incredible invention of pencil of light, we've also grown accustomed to cameras as visual recording devices. But whereas film-cameras have been designed to control the exposure of a recording medium to light in order to create a perceptable image, digital-cameras are data-recording devices merely optimized for recording data from light in order to mimic the experience of film-cameras, including the production of a perceptable image.
Can't wait for that site to come back online.
Gizmodo : The future of digital cameras
Posted by manne at July 17, 2003 10:02 AM | TrackBack