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Cell Phone with Camera = Scanner
An anonymous reader writes "TechJapan has posted a translation of an Impress Watch Article regarding a new technology developed by NEC and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, that lets people use their cellular phones with cameras as scanners. It says all you have to do is move your phone over the surface of the piece of paper while recording a movie, and the technology (some sort of software I presume) will construct a high resolution image from the individual frames of the video.
Here is the original (Japanese) NEC press release." I'd love to see before and afters to see how well this works.
does it make phone calls?
its called a fax machine.
Stay tuned for the explosive shockumentary, where we demonstrate how two tin cans and a piece of string make for a handy alternative to VoIP.
Whether some trick like this makes it happen sooner rather than later only time will tell, but eventually just in terms of raw resolution camera equipped cell phones will be functional full-color scanners.
And this is where things get interesting because fair use permits compies of material in the library for research. But if enough students scan journals at high resolution and then organize and exchange them through the Net, there will be an enormous levelling of the academic playing field. That is a time I look forward to with eager anticipation.
It only mentions paper as the object to take a picture of, but it might also work for objects further away. This could solve the problem of the often very narrow angle lenses those tiny cameras have.
Stitching multiple images automatically is nothing new but is CPU intensive. So Moore's law will take care of that.
Net sa best, mar it koe minder