Technologyquarterly September 3Rd 2011
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Artifi cial muscles Brainwave control: Marc Andreessen’s challenge motors sci-fi no longer second act TechnologyQuarterly September 3rd 2011 Changes in the air The emerging technologies that will defi ne the future of fl ight TQCOV-September4-2011.indd 1 22/08/2011 15:42 2 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly September 3rd 2011 Contents On the cover From lightweight components and drag-reducing paint today, to holographic entertainment systems and hypersonic aircraft tomorrow, researchers are devising the emerging technologies that will dene the future of ight. What can tomorrow’s Cameras get cleverer travellers expect? Page 10 Monitor 2 Computational photography, a new approach to desalination, monitoring yacht performance, spotting fakes with lasers, guiding nanoparticles to ght Consumer electronics: New approaches to photography treat it as a branch of cancer, mopping up oil with wool, smaller military drones, computing as well as optics, making possible a range of new tricks keeping barnacles at bay and HOTOGRAPHY can trace its roots to dierent exposures, into one picture of the religious overtones of Pthe camera obscura, the optical princi- superior quality. Where a single snap may computing programming ples of which were understood as early as miss out on detail in the lightest and dar- the 5th century BC. Latin for a darkened kest areas, an HDR image of the same Dierence engine chamber, it was just that: a shrouded box scene looks preternaturally well lit (see 9 Worrying about wireless or room with a pinhole at one end above). HDR used to be a specialised Concerns about the health risks through which light from the outside was technique employed mostly by profes- of mobile phones are misplaced projected onto a screen inside, displaying sionals. That changed when Apple added an inverted image. This, you might think, it as an option in the iPhone 4. (Previous The future of ight is a world away from modern digital iPhones lacked the oomph to crunch 10 Changes in the air cameras, brimming with fancy electronics relevant data quickly enough to be practi- The technologies that will dene which capture the wavelengths and inten- cal.) Other examples include cameras and the development of aviation sity of light to produce high-resolution apps that stitch together panoramas from digital les. But the basic idea of focusing overlapping images shot in an arc around Modelling behaviour rays through an aperture onto a two- a single point or as a moving sequence. dimensional surface remains the same. But HDR and panoramas are just two 13 Game theory in practice Now a novel approach to photographic ways to splice together images of the same How software can make forecasts imaging is making its way into cameras subject, says Marc Levoy of Stanford and transform negotiations and smartphones. Computational photo- University, who kickstarted computation- graphy, a subdiscipline of computer al photography in a paper he wrote in 1996 Inside story graphics, does not simply capture single with his colleague Pat Hanrahan. Since 15 Muscling in on motors images. The basic premise is to use mul- then aspects of the eld have moved from Articial muscles could give tiple exposures, or multiple lenses, to academia into commercial products. This, motors a run for their money capture information from which photo- Dr Levoy explains, is mainly down to the graphs may be derived. These data con- processing power of devices, such as Brainwave controllers tain myriad potential pictures which camera-equipped smartphones, growing 17 Put your thinking cap on software then converts into what looks faster than the capacity of sensors which Controlling things with thought like a conventional photo. More computer record light data. You are getting more is no longer science ction animation than pinhole camera, in other computing power per pixel, he says. words, though using real light refracted To show o the potential of some new Brain scan through a lens rather than the virtual sort. techniques, Dr Levoy created the Synth- 19 Disrupting the disrupters The best known example of computa- Cam app for the iPhone and other Apple tional photography is high-dynamic-range devices. The app takes a number of suc- A prole of Marc Andreessen, HDR programmer turned investor ( ) imaging, which combines multiple cessive video frames and processes them photos shot in rapid succession, and at into a single, static image that improves on 1 The Economist Technology Quarterly September 3rd 2011 Monitor 3 2 the original in a variety of ways. He and which rays passing through a lens are which works perfectly well online, but his colleagues have also built several captured. In traditional cameras the focal will not pass muster in print. This might models of Frankencamera, using bits of kit plane was a piece of lm; modern ones not matter, though. Nowadays people found in commercially available devices use arrays of digital sensors. In Lytro’s make fewer photographic prints, especial- both low-end, like inexpensive cell case, however, a light ray passes through ly large-format ones where resolution phones, and high-end, such as pricey the main lenswhich uses a wide aper- counts. By contrast, billions of photo- single-lens reex cameras. The Franken- tureand then through one of the micro- graphs are shared online each year. Profes- cameras use a host of clever algorithms to lenses. Only then does it hit a sensor. By sional photographers may still seek higher capture sequences of images and turn calculating the path between the micro- pixel counts, but there is no reason why them into better photos. SynthCam and lens and the sensor, the precise direction future versions of the device could not Frankencameras can improve the quality of a light ray can be reconstructed. That in oer more microlenses. of pictures taken in low-light conditions, turn means it is possible to determine For now, though, Lytro is targeting which are usually quite grainy. They can where the ray would have struck if the internet photo-sharers. It will let owners also create an articial focus that is absent focal plane had been moved. Moving the of its camera upload the image data and from the original images, or render a focal plane is equivalent to refocusing the the processing tools to Facebook and other foreground gure in crisp focus against a lens, so any point in the light eld can social networks. The rm has reportedly blurred backdrop. then, in eect, be brought into sharp focus. already raised $50m. Investors must be In other words, images can be refocused hoping that consumers nd all the irri- Point and shoot after they have been taken (see below). tants that Lytro’s camera removes, like Still, for all the superior results that com- It is also possible to ddle with an blurred or dim pictures, niggling enough putational photography oers, Dr Levoy image’s depth of eldphotographic to want them eliminated once and for all laments, camera-makers have been loth to jargon for the space between the closest from their holiday snaps. 7 embrace its potential. This is about to and most distant points in an image that change. In June this year Ren Ng, a former are in focusor even create an image in student of Dr Levoy’s at Stanford, which every point is in focus. And the launched a new company called Lytro, light-eld approach can produce a com- promising to start selling an aordable pelling simulation of a stereoscopic im- Drops to drink snapshot camera later this year. age. Lytro’s website lets visitors ddle with Rather than use conventional tech- existing images to see how some of these nology, as the Frankencamera does, to features will work. meld successive exposures, Dr Ng has Unlike the information it records, the gured out a way to capture lots of images camera itself is simple. The main lens is simultaneously. This approach is known xed in place; there is no auto-focus, auto- Desalination: A technique called as light-eld photography, and Lytro’s aperture, or other machinery which needs electrodialysis may provide a camera will be its rst commercial in- to be activated every time a photo is taken. cheaper way to freshen seawater for carnation. In physics, a light eld de- Such adjustments take time, causing a lag human consumption scribes the direction of all the idealised between pressing the shutter-release light rays passing through an area. Dr button and actually capturing the image. INGAPORE’S average annual rainfall is Levoy’s and Dr Hanrahan’s seminal paper Lytro’s snaps, by contrast, will be truly Smore than double that of notoriously described a new way to model this eld instantaneous, just as they were in old soggy Britain, so the casual observer might mathematically. Now, 15 years later, Dr Ng snapshot cameras. And, since the lens is be surprised to learn that the place has a has worked out how to implement the preset always to capture the greatest shortage of drinking water. Yet with technique using o-the-shelf chips. amount of light possible, exposure time around 7,000 people per square kilo- Dr Ng’s camera uses an array of several can be short, even in poorly lit conditions. metre, Singapore is the third most densely hundred thousand microlenses inserted One potential downside is the cam- populated country in the world. Its land between an ordinary camera lens and era’s low resolution, which is dened by mass is not large enough to supply its 5m digital image sensor. Each microlens func- the number of microlenses, because the inhabitants with water. tions as a kind of superpixel. A typical processing software treats each microlens One answer is to desalinate seawater.