In a quick blast of acquisitions and patents, Apple have given the strongest hint yet that Steve Jobs’s aim of reinventing photography, may be on the horizon.
Now I’m not saying that Steve jobs was a Time Lord, but considering these recent acquisitions and the patent applications, you can really start to see some thinking outside of our ideas of time and space.
The components to this thinking are threefold:
Firstly the A7 processor inside the iPhone 5s is a very impressive piece of kit that has been able to take photography on the iPhone to the point at which it can capture 30, 8 megapixel stills in two seconds, slow motion HD video and choose when’s best to use the flash or use HDR mode. Any future iPhone will have an even faster and more capable processor for some impressive imaging enhancements.
Secondly the lytro-esque patent allowing for images to be refocused after they’ve been. This extra level of adjustability to an image makes it a true snapshot of time, rather than being one specific view of one specific place at that specific time. Samsung and Nokia have found ways to achieve this with software and HTC are due to announce the replacement to HTC One, packing two cameras, it’s clear imaging is a major new battle field.
Thirdly the purchase of PrimeSense (the company that brought the first Kinect for Xbox to market) adds both theoretical and actual depth to these theories. One of the things that prime sense is not really known for but it has been developing sensors that allow the mapping of three-dimensional space not just humans and animals with in them.
Add these components together and you’re looking at a device that will be able to take an image with multiple points of focus and the ability to map those focus points to 3D depth points and create a high resolution 3D snippet of time.
Just like Time Lord art.
Now I’m not saying that there’s going to be pictures with the depth of Gallifrey Falls but given Google’s Project Tango and below example of an image from a Lytro camera, this kind of technology can not be far way from Apple devices.
Some Apple imaging related patents and acquisitions:
