Re:The holy grail of camera tech....
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HDR Video a Reality
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· Score: 2, Informative
This goes a long way toward the "computational camera" where you get flexible depth of field (focus at many depths), trading off pixel resolution for HDR / multispectral imaging, and other cool techniques (like stereo). Exciting stuff!
One of my biggest concerns: government regulation of amateur builders. The FAA already treats commercial UAVs as regular planes, requiring aircraft registration and 60 day pre-flight plans. While the regulations for hobbyists seem to be more lax, I personally believe the FAA should embrace amateur UAV builders in the same way that the FCC embraced ham radio operators of yesteryear. Besides, building UAVs is a great family bonding activity that promotes engineering.
But... the same economies that make UAVs appealing to hobbyists also make them appealing for asymmetric warfare. While I am not familiar with any incident involving UAVs and nefarious organizations / persons, it is pretty evident that asymmetric economies are at play. It is certainly a slippery slope, but let's just hope the FAA remains lax on hobbyist experimentation -- after all, there is no ban on cellphones despite their use in IEDs.
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This is an interesting idea. However, it is already being subsumed by 3D cameras, more commonly known as depth cameras (a la Microsoft's Kinect), that produce dense 3D pointclouds and color images at framerate. The best example is work by Dieter Fox (et. al.) from University of Washington and Intel Labs Seattle that uses a depth camera to do (near) real-time 3D mapping of indoor scenes -- sort of like a Google Streetview indoors. The benefits of depth camera solutions are multi-fold: much lower cost as sensors like Kinect become available, pointclouds and camera images from a single (registered) source, and better portability.
This goes a long way toward the "computational camera" where you get flexible depth of field (focus at many depths), trading off pixel resolution for HDR / multispectral imaging, and other cool techniques (like stereo). Exciting stuff!
In case you're interested, there has been some nice work in using tabletop interfaces (ie. Microsoft Surface) to control home robots, like the iRobot Roomba.
I actually talked about this some time ago
One of my biggest concerns: government regulation of amateur builders. The FAA already treats commercial UAVs as regular planes, requiring aircraft registration and 60 day pre-flight plans. While the regulations for hobbyists seem to be more lax, I personally believe the FAA should embrace amateur UAV builders in the same way that the FCC embraced ham radio operators of yesteryear. Besides, building UAVs is a great family bonding activity that promotes engineering.
But... the same economies that make UAVs appealing to hobbyists also make them appealing for asymmetric warfare. While I am not familiar with any incident involving UAVs and nefarious organizations / persons, it is pretty evident that asymmetric economies are at play. It is certainly a slippery slope, but let's just hope the FAA remains lax on hobbyist experimentation -- after all, there is no ban on cellphones despite their use in IEDs.