The road to 500Mpx Cam

The human eye is said to have a “resolution” above 500Mpx, if such a comparison can be made, since probably we don’t have yet the right tools to measure that accurately.

We already can create pictures of that size and much bigger, composing and stitching several images with less resolution, we are in the realm of the #TeraPixel atm, this one a 10Tpx Image the Night Sky for example, or this one is a 717Gpx of Rembrandt’s Night Watch. 

The first 0.97 #Gigapixel Image I created, was this one back in 2016 for the 999 Ideas I posted and pictures of clouds I took. (Click on it to explore it)

And the highest I created is only 2.24Gpx of the 40m tall tree I see every day and use as the back of my book recommendations, made by thousands of images and a bit of computing, and somehow unfinished, that was private since 2018 but just made it public for you to watch too. (Click on it to explore it)

My love for digital photography started much earlier in the 90s, and never counted but probably I could have taken more than a million of them. Starting with resolutions about 0.06Mpx or less.

Regarding “mobile” photography, we started also in late 90s when we crated ArtPocketPc a division of one of my first companies, where we developed software and sold PocketPC PDA’s with internet “connectivity” and a compact flash 320x200 pixel camera, to try to kickstart that industry long before the #smartphone and #apps wave. I remember that back then, it was a nightmare for example to try con convince C-level execs of fortune transportation companies to embrace a technology that later will change logistics for good.

I have used and teardown too, dozens of cameras over the years from regular human visible range, #thermal cameras, or lately event-based cameras that will have a lot of potential btw. Testing new technology is a good way to see where the edge is, and find clever possible use cases, since it could open new doors, so whenever I can, in all realms of technology I try to do that.

It is true that smartphone photography has improved vastly over the years, even displacing to some extent the “other” cameras market, being on the reasons too of the collapse of Kodak.

A few days ago, I received a new “Camera”, It is a Smartphone but will use it as an extra cam, with 200Mpx, just released last month by Motorola Mobility (a Lenovo Company) in #China being the first to do so, curious to see the trend, a few years back we look to the #US for pioneer technology, now most of the times we need to look to the East, in the case of Motorola was an American company bought by Lenovo, another partly American company ( IBM ) bought by a Chinese company. And a few years back when I bought the first Smartphone with a 108Mpx Cam, was a Xiaomi Technology another Chinese company and the trend follows.

This new phone the Moto X30 Pro, it is true that it is the first to include a 200Mpx cam, but at least the software side is a bit poor yet, to say the least, and overall is also true that for some settings, smartphone cameras can’t compete with DSLRs or Mirrorless in terms on sensor and optics possibilities. Even son the quality is acceptable if you know what to use it for.

Here is a picture (cropped) with this smartphone of the seme tree above. (sorry no snow today)

Matching human capabilities with technology is all about what we try to do, and in the case of vision with this 200Mpx what I "see" with my eyes is almost everything there, captured in the photographs that it takes.

The thing is that is great to live technology evolution and how it is improving to try to match human capabilities, so much needed for example to create virtual experiences, but also because capturing in a digital format what we #see, #hear, #smell, #touch, #taste or even #feel is a great way to #understand and #remember it.

The father of Neuroscience (another of my great passions) Santiago Ramón y Cajal, is less know for this, but he was also a prolific enthusiast of photography even with the limited capabilities at the beginning of the 19 Century, even his photographic archive and papers is now a UNESCO protected world heritage material since 2017, a privilege just a few humans share, #Copernico, #Linneo, #Newton, #Darwin, #Pasteur, #Tesla and #Pavlov.

He was btw also a pioneer of #stereoscopy a fundamental piece of #VR #AR and #XR nowadays.

At the end photography is also another way of #storytelling , as many others that Byron Reese covers nicely in his great book "Stories, Dice and Rocks That Think", so it really goes beyond technology.

Probably in this decade we will have smartphones or other devices with cameras above 500Mpx, surpassing human capabilities, but there are many other technologies that need to grow also in sync from computation to connectivity to really make them useful.

We are in a race to create technology better than us in many realms, from the mind with #AI to our body with #robotics to the senses, this is not science fiction any more, it is science fact, the big question is: Are we ready? 

David Vivancos

San Lorenzo de El Escorial, September 11th 2022

www.vivancos.com