Future Picture

You remem­ber Dan Reetz, right? He of the DIY book scan­ner. Well, now he’s launched another totally fas­ci­nat­ing, zeitgeist-y project. This one, Future Pic­ture, is all about com­pu­ta­tional pho­tog­ra­phy.

What’s com­pu­ta­tional pho­tog­ra­phy? I actu­ally haven’t been able to come up with a good one-sentence descrip­tion yet; maybe you can sug­gest one. Suf­fice it to say that com­pu­ta­tional pho­tog­ra­phy lets you do things like snap a photo and then focus it after the fact. Or make three dif­fer­ent ver­sions, each focused on some­thing dif­fer­ent. It actu­ally gets kinda close to the clas­sic let-me-just-enhance-that movie effect.

It’s related, at least philo­soph­i­cally, to James Cameron’s pro­duc­tion tech­nique for Avatar: rather than make your cre­ative deci­sions up front—which way is the cam­era point­ing? How fast is it mov­ing? Where are the lights?—you delay them as long as pos­si­ble. You cap­ture the rawest data possible—huge tor­rents of it—and then rely on com­put­ers to manip­u­late and trans­form it later.

I’ll bet you could come up with some cool stuff by apply­ing this approach to wildly dif­fer­ent (and seemingly-incompatible) domains. Cook­ing? Health care? Rela­tion­ships? Think abou­uut it…