theo's gallimaufry

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A camera capable of visualising the movement of light has been unveiled by a team of scientists in the US.

The new technique, which we call Femto Photography, consists of femtosecond laser illumination, picosecond-accurate detectors and mathematical reconstruction techniques. Our light source is a Titanium Sapphire laser that emits pulses at regular intervals every ~13 nanoseconds.

“These are text messages I exchange with my 17 year old cousin Bennett. He is a white boy that thinks he’s a crip, works at Amoco, has a girlfriend named Mercedes, and is one of the most unintentionally funny and brilliant souls on the planet. He has no idea I do this blog. Yes, this is 100% real.”

I wish Bennett would cc me on his texts. But wait a minute, it gets better; Bennett's cousin is Mac Lethal, and here he is responding to a request to do a rap about making pancakes.

In the words of theonetheonly55 "I wish to join this family, NOW. Just for pure enjoyment".

The internet skeptic in me crosses its fingers and hopes this is a brilliant marketing campaign.

This is Bennett: 

via vimeo.com

Remember Sergio who created Content is Queen?

Well he's back with a deeper exploration of portrait painting. The project concerns going beyond physical appearances and attempting to render the interior world of a human being, through memories, emotions, relationships and personal story.

Study of Time takes light, it's presence and it's absence, as a medium for the representation of time. A vividly illuminated autonomous algorithm magically reveals the time of the day, re-imagining the principle of telling time from falling shadows as a contemporary light installation.

"What if you had a camera whose images could be re-focused minutes, days or years after the shot, or viewed in 3D?"

A plenoptic camera, also called a light-field camera, is a camera that uses a microlens array to capture 4D light field information about a scene. Such lightfield information can be used to improve the solution of computer graphics and vision-related problems.

Wow.

The application works in real time and it's developed using the opensource framework for creative coding openFrameworks.

"Most of the "magic" happens thanks to Jason Saragih's c++ library for face tracking web.mac.com/​jsaragih/​FaceTracker/​FaceTracker.html. The face tracking library returns a mesh that matches the contour of the eyes, nose, mouth and other facial features.

That way the mesh obtained from a photo is matched to my own face in the video. Applying some color interpolation algorithms from Kevin Atkinson's image clone code: methodart.blogspot.com/​ gives it the blending effect that can be seen in the final footage.

I'm also using Kyle McDonald's ofxFaceTracker addon for openframeworks github.com/​kylemcdonald/​ofxFaceTracker which wraps Jason's library for easier use.

Kyle has uploaded another video giving a try at a different blending algorithm, which get rids of the artifacts and an even creepier look: vimeo.com/​29348533"

- Arturo Castro