Yea, so obviously everyone’s already gone on about this:
Which is a ball you throw up in the air and it takes 36 photographs that are stitched together by it’s accompanying software, creating a sphere you can zoom in and out of. I think it has inbuilt accelerometers so it takes the photo at its Zenith… the age of sensors etc. Pretty cool – a bit like the opposite of those micro-planets I was on about before, but not really.
Those multi-depth-focus cameras have just hit the market (almost) as well… in a toy version basically.
So that’s kindof cool as well… although I have this sneaking suspish that it will be more of a novelty than anything. Photography is generally about directing attention… to a thing. Not to two things, seperately… although it would be kindof neat to be able to dispense with that whole focusing thing and still get a shallow depth of field. So maybe I’m wrong. I think the files are pretty massive though, and I think it’ll be quite a while (if ever) that the quality gets to the point where the people who actually care about shallow depth of field consider it to be anything other than a novelty.
Anyway… add to that, this:
which has been doing my head in for the last couple of days because the tab has been open in my browser, and every time I start it auto-plays, and there’s some shouting-twat who sounds like he’s faking some sort of insincere sex thing… “Oooh ooh, more more” he goes. Something like that – although it IS actually shooting back at him with a paint-ball gun so maybe he’s getting off on that. You go in as a normal human-being, come out “painted”. A person of colour etc. Whatever – I hate that damien omen choir music as well. Having a whole fucking orchestra going off isn’t scary. Total silence, with the sound of something dripping nearby is scary. Anyway. Cool floor… cool 3D projections, though possibly not quite as cool as this military sim thing
Which is a 14 10Mp projectors seamlessly projecting onto the outside of a sphere, while you sit on the inside.
Which is what it’s going to be like when we do actually get proper space-fighters like the ones off Battleship Galactica, because normal windows won’t work because if you’re anywhere near a star, it’ll go from blindingly bright to totally dark just by doing a roll etc. So what you’ll have is cameras on the outside and some sort of stitched together monitor on the outside – preferably a sphere like the one above… and you won’t actually need to be in the spaceship itself… you might just as well be flying it remotely, which means there won’t be any difference between a simulator and the real thing.
All is simulation. This is a simulation now… you’re actually a detached consciousnous remotely piloting a virtual representation of what you think of as “yourself”, in an entirely artificial reality filled with idiots. Think about it. You know it’s true.
Glyphage
Animated CNC Assembly 
Oh, I'm sorry, have you lost weight?
Lego Biotech Bot
MASSIVE Star Wars Game Screen
DIY Robot Arm
The Face Twitching Guy, Revisited
I am Borgish
On Addiction
And The Void Mooned Back...
The Spirit Of The World
A Machine to Steal Souls
More Anti Digital
Thync
Robotic Sensory Loops and Whatnot
Cartestian Robot Roundup.
Post-Scarcity Link-Dump
Servo Bender
You’re definitely wrong about the lightfield tech, whether or not this specific version is successful, it’s a huge finger pointing towards the further digitalization of reality. Glass and mirrors to focus light is crude 20th century technology – much better to develop a digital sensor capable of capturing far more information about the individual waves
Yea, possibly – I however am one of the people who is enough of a photographophile to care about depth of field… and lenses aren’t just clinical devices to capture information – they give character to whatever is being filmed. My favourite lens is a 1970s 50mm prime… I use it with a digital camera – and while in some ways the more expensive lenses I have are technically superior, they’re not as good.
People who are into this stuff talk about “beautiful lenses”. I’m not sure they’re going to talk about multi-planar digital focus quite the same way. There will be beautiful results maybe… but I don’t think it’s the same. The digital guitar-amp didn’t put valve-amp manufactures out of business.
I (like a lot of people) also shoot at 23.97 FPS – rather than the 60fps that my camera can do – because there’s an asthetic quality that I prefer… because it is closer to what analogue, celuloid uses.
So… maybe in the end, digital eats everything. Optical Zoom eats digital zoom… but not today.
So I think it’ll be a while. Point and Click, yes; Cinefiles/pro-photgraphers… It’ll be at least 10 years. Assuming there are no other mad advances that augment it.
That said – if this tech does destroy the job of “Focus Puller”, then there’s a whole other shift in the ergonomics of film-making that will be pretty irresistable economically… but it’s going to be at least 6 years before home computers can edit 1080p multi-focus video. They can hardly handle single-plane 1080p as it is. I’ve got an i7 quad-core and after a couple of filters are put over the footage, it the processor really struggles to keep up.
For what it’s worth, Gallileo can take a lot of credit for the whole Glass and Mirrors thing… it goes back a lot further than the 20th C. I don’t think it’s crude… yet. Just expensive.
I’m so glad you are bringing up the Lytro today. I am putting the hammer down and getting the small gig one as we speak, if the order went through. Can’t tell.
I’ve read a slew of comments, both critical and rapt, so I’ve got a certain sober idea of what I am buying. I am fully in the rapt category over it–for me and what I’m making more than for the other potential future iteration-al uses.
I’ll know for certain when I receive one, hopefully in February, but I susphish that my artwork, with its enormously rich planes of active detail, was simply (inadvertently) made for this technology.
So this for me is thirsty lust. Plus the metaphor “…captures the entire light field, which is
all the light traveling in every direction in every point in space.” is too titillating for words.