Lytro says they will be building a camera that uses “light field photography” to produce amazing advances in digital camera imaging. It’s a long way between an announcement and a useful point-and-shoot digital camera, but based on what I’ve read so far, this looks very promising.

Here’s a quick video from their YouTube channel that demonstrates the feature

 

The theory behind light-field photography has been around for a while. For example, this paper in 2005 from Stanford:  “Light Field Photography with a Hand-Held Plenoptic Camera” (direct link to the PDF here).

The first core difference from a normal digital photograph is that a microlens array between the main lens and the photosensor. Below is an illustration from the paper, explaining the conceptual physical arrangement.

An image passing through the microlens array is transformed as shown below as it hits the photosensor. And this reveals the second big difference from normal digital photography:  the software to reconstruct a desired image once it has passed through the microlens array.

So What’s the benefit?

First, You don’t have to worry about the time and effort to focus when taking the picture. The software can reconstruct a version of the image you want with the focus exactly where you want it afterward.

See this example from the paper mentioned earlier.

 

The Lytro FAQ also claims that you’ll see that this approach works much better for low-light environments, but I haven’t seen an example demonstrated that clearly.

To experience what Lytro claims to be able to offer, check out their image gallery: http://www.lytro.com/picture_gallery

It’s hard to tell if the gallery is actually reconstructing the image or just demonstrating how it might appear to a user, but you will at least get a sense of what is possible.

Parting Thoughts

• Hard to tell how affordable and good this technology will be without a camera in hand
• The examples on the Lytro gallery aren’t especially sharp in the focused areas – I wonder if this is just due to how the photos were prepared for the site, or due to some inherent quality limitations in the light-field approach

“Interactive material is any piece of software/hardware that represents or simulates a part of user interactive experiences, such as inputs from sensors, output of audio tools, interaction with Web services, or simple drawings” says the Sketchify website.

And the Sketchify tool … defies description … you  just have to watch the videos.

 

Face Detector Demo

 

 

 

Driving Simulation

 

 

This post is about finding the UI elements that let you create or modify the Styles used in Visio. This is a powerful feature that is not widely used, but should be because it can save a lot of time in formatting documents. The method to enable Style Explorer is different between Visio 2007 and Visio 2010 so I’ve described both in detail below.

Styles in Visio 2007

In Visio 2007, there’s an easy way to see and edit the list of styles in a document.

First, by turning going on to the View Menu and selecting Drawing Explorer

You will see the list of styles in the Drawing Explorer

NOTE: The Styles node in the Drawing Explorer is available even if you have not enabled developer mode

And there are right-click menus available for these nodes

   

If you select Show ShapeSheet you’ll see the special ShapeSheet for the Style. Interestingly the Show Shapesheet command is available even if developer mode is not enabled.

 

 

Besides the Drawing Explorer, there is a specific Style Explorer that is available.

Unfortunately the Style Explorer is not an item visible on the View menu when looking at a document. As shows below you can see it is missing when viewing a document.

The Style Explorer is only available when you have a ShapeSheet window open (and usually this means running in developer mode )

If you select it, the Style Explorer will appear in the ShapeSheet window.

It has the same context menu items as we saw in the Drawing Explorer

 

 

Styles in Visio 2010

Surprisingly, the View tab on the Ribbon mentions nothing about the Drawing Explorer

You could customize the View tab on ribbon to add a command to show the drawing explorer or use the Developer tab to enable the Drawing Explorer

The Drawing Explorer still has a Styles node

And if you open a ShapeSheet window …

Then you will see the Style Explorer checkbox on ShapeSheet Tools / Design tab the tribbon

And just as before this will add the Style Explorer to the ShapeSheet window

 

How to enable Developer Mode in Visio 2010

Right click on any tab in the Ribbon and select Customize the Ribbon

Then you’ll be brought to the Customize Ribbon section of the Visio Options dialog box

On the Customize the Ribbon list on the right, under Main Tabs, simply click to enable the Developer Tab and then click OK. And then the Developer Tab will be visible.

 

TinEye –is a site that performs a reverse search on an image. Give it an image (upload a file or point it at a URL) and then TinEye will find other places on the web that contain that image.

Besides the novelty, more practically people often use TinEye to detect content theft - when their images are being appropriated and being displayed with incorrect attribution.

http://www.tineye.com/

Although the specific algorithm TinEye uses is not known (the code is not published), Neal Krawetz recently posted on the Hacker Factor blog elaborating his take on how this might be done via perceptual hash algorithms.

http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/432-Looks-Like-It.html