Universal Convergence

Recently Cameron Reilly commented on his Blog that he believes that online photo sites such as Flickr are killing photography. Whilst I see his point, I disagree with his hypothesis. Digital photography is on the increase and the average photographer today takes a multitude more photos than say an average person 10 years ago. Whilst there are a multitude of reasons why this is so, the major one is cost. It costs virtually nothing today to take a photograph and share it.

 

Digital photography is the capturing of memories from a moment & place in time. When we look at our own photographs or videos they trigger memory recall that can in some instances relive some of the emotions of the time and place. For other people they may just be nice pictures.

 

Sharing experiences is another major value of social consciousness that has followed us from our humble beginnings as humans on this planet, to where we are today with the technology we have created. The web is full of stuff people want to share…. OK, some of it they want to share at a price…. but those days of small camp fire sing alongs and revelling in the gory details of the last mammoth hunt are as extinct today as the proverbial characters in the tales of those long begotten days. Now, we head into the digital age of global communities, where we share, even if those we share with, don’t care for what we share.

 

Microsoft Live Labs (now that could be an oxymoron) has released a technology preview of an amazing product called Photosynth, that can sense structure in digital photographs and then represent them in a spatial, contextual and easy to navigate interface. Whilst this is a limited demonstration with only a handful of collections that one can navigate, the impact of it’s use will be far reaching for the global communities of the digital age.

 

Head over to http://labs.live.com/photosynth/ and see how your holiday snaps will no longer bore your friends and family any more and how Cameron will get his wish of using other people’s pictures to show "been there done that, got the t-shirt"

 

Now the big question is when can I use this technology in my mobile with both digital pictures and videos? 🙂