If you’re into photography as I am, you might be interested in reviewing Canon’s vision of the future through their Wonder Camera Project which was recently announced at the World Expo 2010 currently taking place in Shanghai, China, at the Japanese Pavillion.

While most of us are familiar with SLR camera’s, this concept is entirely new.  The “Wonder Camera Concept” is the camera of the future representing approximately 2 decades ahead of today’s technology.  Some of the features that this camera purports include:

• video capturing everything and in perfect focus
• perfectly exposed images
• every frame of every video will contain perfect still images
• zoom in now or see what you’ve captured later
• shoots images at massive resolution yielding zooms with yet incredible detail

But… at WildWex.com it’s not enough to be amazed.  In order to fully appreciate and comprehend the level at which the envelope has been pressed you need to go further, beyond what is presented by Canon.

This is where the mental exercise and ‘psychological adrenalin’ come into play to start considering what levels such concepts could be taken.

Let’s take a deep dive and brainstorm a bit …

Digital Zoom maintaining Analog Quality

Imagine for a moment what could be offered by such a device.  No more need for switchable lenses.  The ability to capture a vista – that’s right – take in an entire view in a single shot with the ability to have a God-like eye on the world in a mere blink!  Hold that view – zoom in on the tiny bird in the background or take in the entire forest at once gazing at the environment in all it’s beauty.

No lenses? Then what… Camera Applications!

Canon has made a mint selling lenses.  But a camera with a single lens able to take macro and telephoto shots disrupts their lens sales.  Ah yes – but there is the smartphone models to consider!  Imagine a library of downloadable applications available for your still/video concept camera.  We’re not simply talking touch-screen here.  Applications on various smartphones leverage various sensors (compass, GPS, network connectivity, etc) to bring about new dimensions of applications.  While color modifying lenses of today offer various quality tones, sepia, filters, and even GPS, camera’s of tomorrow that are networked could be leveraged to point, shoot, and identify objects in a view.  Such identification of objects offers various enhancements that we’ve not considered.

For example, take a picture of a bird.  The type of bird may be identified, but from a single viewpoint, you might not see the entire structure of that bird.  However, by uploading the image to a central database, and it getting ‘object-tagged’ the image could be ‘super imposed’ with non-visible data enabling you to select the bird and look at it close up, based on a network system database of images or stored model.

Extrapolating, you might take a single picture, and identify tens, hundreds, or thousands of objects.  You could take a picture or video and spend days reviewing the details, much like an astronomer might take a picture of the sky and study the constellations or the stars themselves.

Not just a camera

Why stop there?  Visit a stadium at your favorite sporting event.  Slowly sweep the camera across at 180 degree view in video mode and find out through network processing of the image if any of your friends are there!  With it’s build in zoom technology, every face is captured in detail, and as similar as we use Shazam to listen and identify music, we could readily identify the faces of those that we do know, or those that we don’t simply by making queries to the images that millions of people have posted on Facebook.  Unreal, huh?!

3D Vista View

In fact, it’s no wonder that Canon hadn’t suggested a ‘second lens’ to offer a 3rd dimensional view enabling perspective to be added as a property of the image – every item in which a photon bounced off and projected into each lens to offer a three dimensional view, zooming in and out at will.

3D Environmental View

But why stop there, ad several cameras equipped with GPS or an advanced positioning system so that images taken from various angles would enable a computer to take several perspectives of 3D Vista Views and put together a holographic environment enabling one to ‘step into the photo’ via a room, enabling you to experience the environment.

3D Environmental Experience

And going further, with the advent of video build into the device so that you could place several of these 3D concept cameras pointing at a vista and taking short-term video in order to create an experience.  The resulting video’s would be fed into a computer that would leverage the video to take in and

1) identify all the objects in the environment
2) watch the movement of the objects
3) study any bahaviors of the objects
4) recreate a holodesk style environment with which could experience the Vista and all it’s movement.

For example, if you’re using the several concept cameras in video mode for a short-term and feed it into a computer.  You could literally ‘walk’ the environment – the trees, the grass, watching them sway and move.   Take a long-term video and experience the environment in day and night, critters and all.

3D Sound

But it’s never enough simply to view, but to hear all that is around and leverage multiple web-like sound catchers to catch sound waves large and small and put that into the mix for reproduction.

The Real Future

But where can all this go?  Once we do away with things to amuse and evolve into a society whose deeper interest is to involve ourselves with things that enhance – mind, body, and soul, we’ll recognize that enhancing our eyes, ears, and those things for which we’ve struggled to capture and reproduce (e.g. smell, touch and taste), our interests will be more of a synaptic capture of our experiences rather than through devices, enabling us to share the experience in ways we’ve never thought possible.

”Canon” and Canon product and services names published on this website are the Trademark or Registered Trademark of Canon Inc. and/or other members on the Canon Group. Other names, such as those of products of other companies, are the trademarks or registered trademarks of each company.

While today, we relish in the achievements of medical science over the last 10 years, we have to ask ourselves – why is it that 1 in 4 of us need to wear corrective lenses? There are many theories and observations which reflect that the population whom need such lenses has been increasing more dramatically over the last 10 years!

I do have one thought that I believe will mark a revolution in corrective lens technology.

Lab Grown Corneal Overlay Lenses

Just as science today can grow organs and skin, since will one day be able to grow corneal lenses for your eyes, much like a contact lens, using your own corneal cells grown, leveraging techniques in stem cell research.  Once grown, the lenses are treated and carefully shaved to your perfect prescription.   Once complete, they are placed on your eyes, just like a contact lens, however, given that their biological makeup generated from your own cells, these overlays slowly fuse to your own cornea in a matter of hours and literally become part of your own eye, providing the same level of light and oxygen needed for your eye to pass oxygen.   Some research in that direction is already being executed.

Imagine – you can throw your prescription glasses and contacts away and opt for a permanent lens that is custom designed to give you exactly the clear vision you seek!

When will we be able to obtain such medical advances that are literally just a few years away leveraging existing science?  When Corporations can find ways to reach sustainability from Human Good rather than from Profit, we might one day find ourselves in a renewed Renaissance period that will once again rally around human potential.

Why buy when you can rent! That’s right – this website allows women to rent jewelry, much like NetFlix allows you to rent a DVD through a low monthly fee. One can gain access to an unlimited supply of jewelry, and trust me when I tell you, this stuff looks like the real thing – we’re not talking cubic-Z, we’re talking lab-grown diamonds!

I’m certain that most jewelry-based websites that you’ve been to look nothing like this. BorrowedBling is video oriented. You get to see a full view of each piece – not some life-less still image. If you’d like an endless supply of pieces that can be popped in the mail to you with a return envelope for fees as low as $29/month, I urge you to take a gander – they make it easy!

But the fact is, history can offer us such a vast wealth of insight and information.  If we take the time to look & truly observe, we begin to learn what a sheltered live we actually live …from the perspective of time.  That’s right – with all the technology that we have in place today (Facebook, SMS Messaging, Instant Messaging, mobile phones, online news), so much focus has been myopically placed on what’s happening now – right now – at this very moment, that yesterday doesn’t matter, and we are all blindly ever to ‘patient’ to give enough non-fearful care about what the can future bring.  For many, we simple ‘let it happen’ rather than apply ourselves and seize the opportunities that become available.

I urge you to take a few moments, pull up a chair & sit back– click here and watch the entire video – and if you have a notepad, take some notes, observing what you see.  I think you’ll be astounded at what you might learn, by observing 1906 San Francisco, days before the earthquake.

Did you watch?  What did you observe?  There’s much to consider:

• B&W Film
• Elegant Clothing – long dresses (Victorian) on ladies, men wore three-piece suits, a hat on virtually every gentleman
• Large & Elegant Automobiles
• Drivers sat on the right side of the automobile – easier to exit to the curb
• People running in the street between cars and trollies
• The roads were shared multiple forms of transportation – at the same time and enmass – pedestrians, bicycles, automobiles, trollies, horseback, horse drawn carriage.
• Virtually everyone in this video has passed on
• Lack of road signs or traffic signals which today populate our streets every 20 feet, it seems!
• People were not ‘in a hurry’
• No ‘road rage’
• Few visual billboards
• Smog!
• Women and minorities didn’t have the right to vote
• You’re watching through your computer – unheard of only a decade ago.

Comments from others:

• It’s crazy to think about the fact that at this point in time (1906) there were less than 1 billion people on the entire planet. The average life expectancy in the U.S. was 47 years and there were only about 8000 cars. We’re all looking at people who earned a living on 22 cents an hour, making $200-$400 a year… At this time the flag only had 45 stars. Think of the wars yet to fight, there wont be even an idea of many of the innovative technology we all depend on today, for another 80+ years.
• Fascinating and haunting, it’s like watching ghosts. So much has changed, but so much remains the same. The Port of San Francisco clock tower is still there, Market Street still seems about as wide as it was back then, and many of the buildings that line it still look the buildings in this video. Even the present-day cable cars look very much like the ones from over a century ago.”
• Jaywalking: Okay
  Jumping on or off moving vehicles: Okay
  No pedestrian right of way
  No drivers license
  No sales tax
  No welfare
  No women voting
  No income tax
• Just something to think on.In this video: Every person, be they a business man, the paper boy, the coach driver, have died by now,
  Every building crubmbled,
  Every streetcar dismantled (except 2),

  In this video: We are, 1 year before the San Francisco Earthquake,
  7 years before the Titanic sinks,
  7 years before New Mexico and Arizona become states,
  9 years before World War 1,
  13 years before the massive influenza outbreak

• Mesmerizing! Competing paper boys; ladies running; guys playing tag with streetcar; heavy, horse-pulled carts; woman elegantly stepping into trolley. Pedestrians, cyclists, horses, cars, trolleys navigate liquid sea of life. Amazingly fluid; a well-timed dance. People outside = better senses? Today in climate-controlled spheres… no poop or cobblestones to step over. No sound. Red, green, pedal to metal. Unaccustomed to inconvenience. Improvements birthed road rage. Getting there any faster?
• Seven minutes of controlled chaos. No seat belts, helmets, traffic signs or traffic cops. Just people taking responsibility for their own safety.
• I also love the chaos of the street where people, automobiles, streetcars, and even horse-drawn carts share the same space with no rules yet everything still works. I bet you anything that most people of today plopped down into that environment would start agitating “there ought to be a law!” just because the lack of an official order would rub them the wrong way, despite the orderly chaos working.
• I’m impressed as I look at the area and consider that every one of those bricks was laid by hand. I mean to think that entire street was hand-made and not just bulldozed and then covered in asphalt is truly a remarkable thing.
• It’s very interesting how people use the street almost like a sidewalk, walking around so casually and mixing in with cars and horses; traffic is so slow paced and sporadic that they don’t need crosswalks. And there is quite a bit of running; I guess people were more active, then.
• I don’t think they are thin because there is not enough food; it’s because people were active, walked a lot, didn’t drink Big Gulps of high fructose corn syrup with their meals, and didn’t get in the car to go a block down the street.
• No income tax, no sales tax, and no one ever went faster than this, anywhere. And the promise of the Embarcadero at the end of the line – you could get on a ship going anywhere.
• My wife says this video makes her sad. And I agree that it does have an emotional impact. The people seem so quick and alive and full of energy compared to what we see on American streets now.
• I always wondered with liberty and the pursuit of happiness looked like. Now I know. Thanks!
• This music brings the events and people in the film alive but in a dream-like way…What happened to the cyclist (0.25): the man waving (1.15); the man eating the apple as he crossed the road (2.45): the cheeky newspaper boy (3.00); the man on the galloping horse (3.28), the boys holding on to the back of the car (4.57)??They never knew they’d become characters who entertained and fascinated 600,000+ people over 100 years later on a medium that was not at the time invented.

As we live our day to day lives in the 3rd dimension, I’m going to refer to a 3rd dimensional object for which we are all familiar: the cube.

1st Dimension

As we look at the cube, let’s begin with one tip of the cube – a point.   That individual point has no length and no width.  It is simply a location within a system.  Now, consider a separate corner (zero-dimensional point) on that cube and draw a line between the two points.  The line, drawn between the two points represents an object in the first dimension.  It has what we call ‘length’ but it has no width and no height.  It has only one dimension.

2nd Dimension

If we look at one side of our cube, we see a surface.  That surface exists in two dimensions.  Just as a piece of paper, it has length and width, but no height.

3rd Dimension

Next, as we continue to focus on our cube, imagine holding it in your hand.  If we have a pair of dice in our hands and we hold one up and look at it, we see that it has 6 surfaces.  As three dimensional creatures, we see at most sides of it.

4th Dimension

Now lets extrapolate.  A zero dimensional object is represented as a point, or a single location of our cube. A 1st dimensional object is represented as a line… one edge of our cube.  The 2nd dimension can be represented as a surface – or one of the 6 sides of our cube.  In that dimension, we can only see one side of the cube.  In the 3rd dimension, as we look at the cube, as we hold the cube in our hand we can see at most three sides of the cube at any one time.  Are you with me?

In school, we are subjected to the concept that the 4th dimension relates to both space & time.  And so, to infer, within the 4th dimension, you can see all sides of the cube, at the same time. That’s right – as you look at our opaque cube, all six sides are ‘visible’ to you at once, without having to turn it around!   And that’s my provide a novice an observation of what the 4th dimension is.*

*Note – one could certainly attempt to simulate such observations by making the cube transparent or by positioning some mirrors to provide the same effect, but that would cheat the intent of this analogy.

Further reading…

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a wonderful research for learning more about the Fourth dimension as well as Spacetime.

Rob Bryanton’s – Imagining the 10th Dimension

For the uninitiated whom which to gain the perspective of higher dimensions, I highly recommend watching and listening to Rob Bryanton’s Imagining the 10th  Dimension video piece which engages you through the 10th Dimension.  It is a facinating account of how one can grasp the concept of higher dimensions through the concept of ‘folding’.