Tiny little cameras that fit inside pens and can shoot 1.5 hours of 1,280×960 at 30fps… for $65
!!!
What’s interesting about that, is not the spying part, but the hacking part. It’s that they’re small enough to hack onto flying robots etc – and cheap enough to lose… or use as bifocals.
Can’t find any example videos to see what the quality is like. It’s a nice little unit though.You could use them for rockets or kitty cams etc
Both of which make me feel dizzy and sick. Still… Nick Drake is cool.
It’s a 26 giga-pixel photograph of Dresden, taken over 90 hours by a robot.
Check out the ferris wheel on the far left… then zoom slightly to the left… two people on bikes on a cycle-path next to a river…. then zoom right back to the starting point. In the hotel in the foreground, you can zoom right in to a bloke leaning out the window, waving. It reminds me of Pieter Bruegel for some reason.
Blows my mind. I don’t know what this is a significator of, but I know it’s a significator of something.
Something to do with Immersion. The ability to zoom almost infinitely. Pity it takes so long to shoot – imagine being able to do it in real-time. All I’d need would be the ambient noise over headphones, and a smellovision plugin blowing the moderately polluted Eastern Germanic air…
Ok… I’ve finally cracked – and have gone over to Linux, because Windows is just too slow, and too frustrating… and too fuckin ugly and evil. The new salvo of Windows advertising where they try to get you to host “Windows 7” parties was just too much. I never want to have anything to do with these people ever again. Charlie Brooker summed it up best “it induces an entirely new emotion: a blend of vertigo, disgust, anger and embarrassment which I like to call “shitasmia”. It not only creates this emotion: it defines it. It’s the most shitasmic cultural artefact in history”
Away, away…
To Linux/Ubuntu : you can boot into linux from a usb memory stick now. It’s really easy – and a different world. Everything is nice… and free and easy. Everything is there to help you, rather than confining you and containing you with… fine-print and THREATS. I also installed vBulletin recently – a paid package… honestly, it’s was like being a sheep in a cattle-run, being barked at on all sides by mad dogs with mad, frightening faces made of buzzing white-noise of legal-speak.
So anyway, what it has meant is that I have finally gotten round to backing up EVERYTHING. Several decades of photos. All of it, all uploading to the cloud as we speak. It’s going to take days.
And out of this, a couple of things have become apparent.
1) “losing photos” is less of a problem than forgetting you ever had them.
2) most of it’s shit. You wouldn’t think twice if you never saw it again
3) some of it though, takes you back. Some of it is pricelessly valuable… which raises this other Big Problem…
4) The biggest problem. Not of losing photos, not of not being able to find them… or forgetting you had them. The biggest loss is not taking them in the first place.
One of the jobs of the transition generations – the early 21st century isn’t just to create data – to bear witness to their lives, but to digitise that of the 20th… and previous generations. I think last year, there was more photographs uploaded to Flickr than had actually been taken in the entire history of photography previous to this.
This is normal – it’s how it should be. It does my head in how much has been lost. Sometime soon I’m going to try to connect with other people to restore as much of our own digitised lives as possible… but… it’s like finding scraps of photos after a fire.
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ps: That photo is my mate Adi, backstage at The Riverside in Newcastle sometime in the early 90s.
It’s worthy of note because the walls had years and years of graffiti from touring bands – and had become something of a national treasure. Nirvanna had tagged it for example. A lot of people played there.
Anyway, eventually this band called the Teenage Fanclub went all art-rock on it, and instead of adding their graffiti, turned up with paint and rollers and completely redecorated it. All those moments were lost like tears in rain.
It’s a camera… or more accurately, a bunch of synchronised cameras, that someone has put together for around $300… and they take 360 degree photos in 8 second bursts… a bit like google street-view… but you can wear it as a hat!
Although you would look like a bit of a twazzock if you did. Still… I really like the idea of fully immersive video… particularly for tourism… instead of actually going to the National Gallery in London, you hire a robot that you control over the web… and with the right kind of headset, it feels a bit like actually being there.
I keep getting this vision of The Internet… The Universal Mind, having so many cameras and sensors going at once, that they cover the entire world (well, big cities at least) in this kind of lucid soup of perception. There are so many cameras at London railway stations right now that it’s practically already there… but anyway, there’s this soup of perception, that with the right software stitching together all the input from the different cameras, you can move through… and see pretty much whatever you’d see if you were walking (or flying) through the place yourself.
It’s a little robot that sits there doing it’s facial-recognition thing, combined with it’s rule-off-thirds thing, happily taking photographs of whoever happens to be around.
I think this is a really neat idea – not for parties, but for absorbing local colour – for sitting at an outdoor table in a square on holiday somewhere, and letting the robot unobtrusively take photographs of the most interesting things it can find… which are almost always the people milling about, but pointing and clicking at them is a bit intrusive.
I think it’s quite remarkable how quickly this has gone from an Oooh and Aaah wonder on Digg etc, to being something that anyone anywhere can now do without having to know what they’re doing.
Well… you just have to ask Microsoft : There’s more mileage to be gained from flattening an expertise-gradient than there is from being an expert. Every barrier to entry is an opportunity.
Usually I’m not that into proprietary-gadget porn, especially if it costs $9000, but this showreel for a SprintCam v3 is seriously impressive. Mostly 1000 FPS.
Mind you, the slo-mo is kindof a special effect and not much good for anything else – unless you’re doing scientific work with it I suppose. Or porn. Do people like slo-mo porn? I suppose they probably do. People are a bit weird sometimes. Still, not as weird as it would be if you were into it being sped up 1000 times. I mean what are you, a bee?
The first one being called snail-eye, which is what I’m on about in this posting…
Basically what I want (kindof) is a tiny 360 degree lens on a stick. Something that you can use to take a 360 degree shot of absolutely everything in your immediate environment…. work out the dimensions/perspective etc in software. I don’t think snails eyes do this… but they look as though they should, so that’s kindof the inspiration.
There are a bunch of companies doing parabolic mirrors eg: www.0-360.com
But they ain’t quite there yet I don’t think. I think I’ve seen one that can do this with a lens as well, but what I have in mind is something really really small. LED-sized or smaller.
There would be loads of uses for these – from keyhole-surgery to remote-tourism… if you could make them small enough (and that is kindof the point) you could sprinkle a whole load of them connected to inter-communicating rfid chips (or something) and someone wearing 3d glasses could be given a simulation of walking between them. Maybe.
I wish I was back in Prague. That’s all.
This was at least partly inspired by the news that…
A miniature telescope implanted into the eye could soon help people with vision loss from end-stage macular degeneration. Last week, an advisory panel for the Food and Drug Administration unanimously recommended that the agency approve the implant. Clinical trials of the device, which is about the size of a pencil eraser, suggest it can improve vision by about three and a half lines on an eye chart.
You live here alone and sit all day under a giant mushroom talking to a persian cat who wears brass spectacles and reads Proust aloud and smokes a cheroot etc. You have a car with butterfly wings and there are peacocks and seahorses and daffodils that reach up to the sky. This is what it’s like in winter:
