Emerging technologies in video
A lot of developments in video. So let's have a closer look at some of the possible emerging technologies in 2007 in the era of pictures and video.
The virtual world is changing rapidly. We are now in the era of picture and video and less text. More people search online for video, creating, sharing, and editing it more than ever before.
Image and video search. It is hard to find a particular video clip with a traditional search engine. But more and more search engines help us by searching just video and pictures. Think about Riya and Like. Riya is a photo-sharing site with face-recognition software that allows people to search photo collections by face. Like is a site that makes it possible to search for shoes, handbags and for example watches by scouring the Web for similar pictures. In the year of 2007 we will see much more of these initiatives to search by image.
Projectors into mobile-phones. We capture everything with our mobile phones. But a big problem is that screens of mobiles are to small to view the media. Nokia understands the problem and is developing projection systems into mobile phones. Also Microvision is actively developing projectors for mobile phones. Researchers at Cornell University are working on tiny micro-electromechanical systems to create small, efficient projectors.
Geotagging. GPS becomes more common in mobile devices. This results into transreality, the physical and virtual world will mix. The first examples of this are the photo-sharing site Flickr who lets people tag photos with the name of the location where they were shot. This makes it possible to search for photos by geography. Nokia is developing the MARA-project. It’s the Mobile Augmented Reality Applications (MARA) project, which explores utilizing camera equipped mobile devices as platforms for sensor-based, video see-through mobile augmented reality. The project also investigates new applications enabled by MARA, and paradigms motivated by restrictions of mobile devices. (See also Nokia and augmented reality on this blog)
Content creation and sharing. More and more people tasted last year the many new possibilities of web 2.0. We all could let our voices heard with our personal blogs, podcast and vodcast. The year 2007 will stimulate this further because it will become more easier to post on the internet because many standard applications will have the blog functionality and making pod- and vodcasts will become much easier. Interacting will become in 2007 the standard in software.
Flash memory. Flash memory gives us much more possibilities to store information. It is an alternative to magnetic, spinning hard drives and made memory smaller and sturdier. Companies as Intel, Freescale Semiconductor , and Samsung are working on new ways to increase storage density and shrinking chip size. In the near future we possibly will have our whole computer on a wearable chip so we can take it everywhere with us.
More information on these subjects on Technology Review (source Technology Review).