IEEE Future Directions
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At NAB 2017 one of the emerging trends was the M.E.T. effect, that is the symbioses among Media, Entertainment and Technology. In a way it is nothing new, these three “factors” have interplayed with one another for a hundred years now but it is probably just recently that the symbioses has become so strong leading to a fast evolution of them all. Yesterday I mentioned the announcement of a drone with an on board camera at very high resolution opening up interesting possibility, and just the day before the use of drones to create “vertical” art.
One of the latest creation presented at NAB was a cluster of six digital cameras forming a cube and covering a spere (each camera covers 240+ degrees of view and all together they can “see” whatever is around). You can see a clip here.
That is a very heavy, and costly, set able to generate a wow effect but with limited impact on evolution of the way we, as lay people, record and see the world. However, it is a different story with the Nikon KeyMission 360, announced in 2016 and now available for about 500$ and fitting in the palm of your hand. It brings 360 degree filming to … the masses and that might open the door to a different way of filming and looking at images.
Interestingly, the review of the camera gives high marks to the hardware and low marks to the software. Why interesting? Because it means that we have a good hardware platform that is waiting for third parties to create services on it. I don’t know if this will happen any time soon but I can bet that it will (whether on this camera on onto different ones remain to be seen).
Today’s smartphones are able to capture a panoramic photo, some can mix photos with filming and there are tools that let you explore a photo bringing you inside the image.
I see this as a trend for the coming years. Technology supports the capture of the world around us and can make us feel as part of that reality once we are looking at the photo/film. This is supporting immersive reality and having seen some of the proposals being prepared for the EIT Digital 2018 Call I can see that a number of companies are at work to exploit these possibilities in areas like tourism, production, realtors support and simple home living.
It goes beyond capturing 360 degrees images. It includes interacting with them with the support of software that can recognise the objects in the image and connect each of them to its virtual representation in the cyberspace (constructors are now creating digital representations of buildings using BIM -Building Information Modelling- and these can be made available to third parties to create services exploiting augmented reality technologies).
At the Future Direction Committee we have received requests to look into 3D imaging and multi media as an emerging technology space that will have a significant impact on several industries and on every day life.
