The Juicy Cow

I’ve been using digital cameras for about 6 years. My first digital camera was a Canon Digital Ixus 400 / PowerShot S 400 (4 MP). It was an excellent camera even if it had a small screen and was bigger than today’s point and shoot cameras. Later on I sold it to a friend and bought a Digital Ixus 40 / PowerShot SD 300 (4 MP). What was interesting for me in this model was the smaller size and the extra speed (new electronic (Digic II) compare to the Ixus 400 / S 400). About 2 years ago I broke the Ixus 40 / SD 300 during a party (had to make a choice between saving the beer or the camera, I went for the beer), it was a good excuse to buy a new toy. So I bought a Canon SLR 350D / Digital Rebel XT (8 MP). This is an excellent camera, perfect for my “advanced amateur” use. It has just the right amount of mega pixels and works just perfectly every time I need it (I took about 80 000 shots with it (ouch!)).
My next purchase, when my 350D will die, will probably be a Canon SLR 40D.

The notable evolutions I experienced during those 6 years of digital photography were:
- Decrease of camera size
- Increase of camera speed (On/Off and shooting)
- Increase of mega pixel number

Today those factors have reached their own limits. Camera can’t get smaller because users like big screens on the back. Speed is already close enough to instantaneity that average user won’t feel any difference with faster electronic. Mega pixels have become a marketing only argument (in a nutshell, everything upper than 8MP is point less for a non professional use).
Today’s evolutions are mainly software related (face “recognition” systems) and merging of point and shoot innovations with the SLR world (LCD live view) and vice versa (image stabilizer).

So what’s next? What are we going to experience in the next couple of years?

1. Point and shoot cameras will probably be completely overcome by camera phones in the next 24 to 36 months

Today’s camera phones are reaching 5MP. This is already largely enough to fulfill average customer needs. In the next 12 months it will reach 8MP and the integrated optic quality will be improved again. Then it will be point less to carry both equipments at the same time (point and shoot camera and camera phone). We can imagine that the camera phone will remain in our pockets when the point and shoot camera will stay home and get dusty.

Today camera phones pictures represent already 1% of all Flickr pictures (10 Millions pictures (60% Sony Ericsson and 40% Nokia (the only two camera phones brands statistically represented on Flickr) out of the 1 Billion pictures on Flickr). They already compete directly with Nikon point and shoot cameras that have a market share of about 3.5% on Flickr (knowing that Nikon P&S cameras have had many more years of market existence compare to camera phones). If you are interested in statistic within the Flickr webservice you can check out this page.

2. Integrated GPS will bring a whole new dimension to digital photography

It is already possible to geo tag your pictures using Yahoo! Maps or Google Maps applets on Flickr or elsewhere. To do so you have to point on the map the location where you took your shot. Most of the time you won’t be very precise, pointing the street block or even only the city. Especially when you share a lot of pictures you won’t take the time to precisely geo tag all of them.

With integrated GPS capacities into our DSLR or camera phone each picture will be automatically located with a precision down to 1 or 2 meters. Within months it’s millions of pictures that will be shared together with their localization details.

With people photographing their world, their life and with those pictures being very precisely localized we can imagine the construction of virtual worlds that won’t be that virtual anymore.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas did a presentation at Ted Talks about an application he developed with Microsoft Labs. It’s an overview of what’s coming soon. Check it out here:

GPS localization will be the ultimate tag for such application.

3. Advanced recognition systems

Today, our P&S can recognize faces. They cannot tell us who’s who, but they can tell us what is a face and what isn’t. The interest here is to get a proper exposition on people faces when taking a group picture for example.

Well not bad but the very next step is more exciting. What if you teach your camera who’s who? Then your camera could automatically add, within the picture meta data, the names of the people you’re taking pictures of. One concrete application would be the automation of face tagging in Facebook. Another would be a much more accurate and large panel of results when searching for a person’s picture with Google Images for example.

But that’s not all. If your camera can recognize faces, why not extend the recognition system to all objects / shapes?
The technology exists. There is a couple of companies working on it. Riya is my favorite. They built a search motor that look through thousands of pictures for the shape you entered. If you’re interested you can have a look to Munjal Shah’s blog (Riya’s CEO and co-founder).

With such technology every single picture increases its intrinsic value. Even your last holiday pictures become interesting to marketers that can now detect what is your tee-shirt size/favorite color, your family/friend network size (people redundancy within your pictures) or what is your car model/color/brand…

The best is that this technology can be used on already exciting digital pictures. I guess the folks at Flickr, with more than a billion pictures archived, are pretty happy about that.

4. Wireless technologies

Wireless is everywhere, especially around your computer. Internet, keyboard, mouse, phone… Thanks to technologies such as Bluetooth and WiFi, they can all interact with each other without the hassle of physical connection.

So far there is only a few camera models that offer such wireless capacities (example: Canon PowerShot SD430 Wireless). Today’s issues are lake of battery power and slow transfer speed (especially for heavy 10MP pictures).
Battery power is constantly improved and will be helped with very high speed wireless transfer. Less time you need to wirelessly transfer your pictures, less power it will need to perform.

What are the applications?
Let’s say you are at a party, lots of people that don’t really know are taking pictures. You would like to have those pictures. How can you do that today?
- You can hope that Facebook magic will bring the pictures to you. Not very reliable.
- You can ask for the pictures to be sent to you, via emails or via links on Flickr for example. Even less reliable than Facebook magic. Most of the time you won’t get the pictures or if you get them it will be months after.

With wireless technologies, you could just put both cameras on a “sharing” mode and the pictures would fly in between the cameras. Then you will have all the pictures you want in a minute. It’s more reliable sharing “on the spot” as opposite to sharing online.

Microsoft created a bit of a buzz a couple of months ago with their Microsoft Surface technology. It’s another example of what could be done with wireless cameras. Check it out:

5. New User Interface Design

As our cameras become more advanced, they could also become harder to use. There is two trends to consider here. The first one is that users like big screens. The second one is that cameras (especially camera phones) have more and more functions.

Why not accommodate both trends? Apple recently showed the way with their shiny iPhone, for the first time a phone lost all its keys for a big, smart, touch screen.
According to the users reviews it works quite well. Have a look:

From the moment that you can use your screen to display keys, you don’t need those “physical” keys on the camera anymore. You have then more room for the screen. We can imagine that the back of our camera become a big touch screen where keys can be displayed where the user wants them, the user could even create its own keys doing its most repetitive tasks.

Of course this technology is not completely new (Sony does it already for a couple of years on its digital cam recorders). What is interesting here is the confluence of two different trends that lead to a better user experience.

Conclusion:

Let’s summarize those 5 trends here:
1. Camera phones overtaking P&S cameras.
2. Picture geo-localization through GPS technology.
3. Embedded face and object recognition systems.
4. High-speed wireless social functions.
5. Touch Screen customizable user interface together with bigger screen.

So the next time you use your digital camera be aware that your picture, after it’s wirelessly downloaded, could become part of the construction of a virtual universe where you could navigate through billions of meta-information such as color, shapes, people, items… Possibilities are immense.

If you like the topic, you can also have a look to my post about Flickr (facts and figures).

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