THE SPATIAL VIDEO REVOLUTION
I haven’t been able to experience the $3500 Vision Pro, but I am getting close, and I sense another huge technological change is coming as, at 86, I stumble into the world of virtual and augmented reality. I know others have celebrated and entered this meta world but it is new to me. I discovered a couple of months ago that I could make 3D videos on my iPhone and while on this last trip I have made over 100, without being able to see any of them as a spatial 3D video. But I am about to be able to see what I have creating, and when I do I am guessing that my world, aa I shift from flatland photos and movies and Facetime calls, and pretty soon everything, to a 3D world that is, amazingly, just the same as the 3D actual, every day world that I am living in now as I look across my living room and see everything in 3D, the result of having two eyes four inches apart.
I don’t know how much of this new virtual 3D world is a result of artificial intelligence, but I suspect a good deal is. While I am reading articles discussing artificial intelligence (AI), usually with the purpose of trying to decide how to fend it off, I am realizing that it is already, like a huge wave, breaking over me. I am, we are, accepting it and using it and are caught up in it without being aware of it. It is too late to fend it off.
The arrival of the touchscreen cell phone was a similar wave. We didn’t have a chance to say no before we were addicted. And if we did resist and refused to use it we were simply left out. We couldn’t escape. We could refuse but in refusing we were simply being left behind.
There are four things that my new iPhone 15 Pro Max camera has that the iPhone 14 didn’t have. I only knew about three of them, and then only with hints, before I bought the 15 Pro Max. But each of them changed or greatly enhanced the way I take photographs with an iPhone.
1. 5 x optical zoom. Optical zoom is better than digital zoom. 5x zoom allows me to take photographs of people unnoticed from a distance. On a normal sized DSLR camera a 5x zoom lens has to be large, a kind of extended telescope. How in the world can a cell phone’s tiny lens take such clear zoom photographs? It must be some kind of digital manipulation of the tiny amount of light that hits the tiny sensor. That digital manipulation is artificial intelligence.
2. Twice the resolution from 12 MP a photograph to 24 MP. Again, how does this happen on a tiny sensor? Again there must be digital manipulation. But it means that with my unnoticed shoot from the hip style of street photography it is much easier to crop to the tiny part of the photograph that I want to use.
3. Adjustable focus. Apple calls this portrait mode. You can take a portrait and only the person’s face will be in focus with the background not in focus. It is artificial intelligence that locates the face and focuses on it. It takes a $1000 lens with a very low aperture, below 2, to do this on a normal DSLR. But Apple is able to do this digitally, and on the 15 Pro is able to do something even more miraculous. After taking the photograph you can change the focus just by touching the part of the photograph that you want to be in focus, or you can bring everything into focus. No DSLR can do that, or if they can it has to be through artificial intelligence. I have no idea at all how this is possible. But it means that I can take a portrait and if the background is junky I can blur it out and if it is alive I can bring it into focus.
4. Spatial video. I didn’t even know the iPhone 15 could do this when I bought it. But it is miraculous. This has almost no connection to normal photography, digital or film. Yes, people have been making stereoscopic photographs for 150 years. In the Victorian period cards with the same photograph in slightly different focus were looked at through two lenses that would slide back and forth on a wooden frame and when we were kids there were cardboard circles that would rotate in a plastic two lens stereoscopic viewer. Spatial video is the same idea but I’m sure it is done in a completely different way and now anyone can have a stereoscopic camera in their pocket which makes 3D videos they will view through goggles that will project the photographs into space that will wrap around our heads as we look at them. This is the magic of artificial intelligence again at work.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 