LADAR Imaging & Rich Context Capture
by Imran Ali
Years ago I remember reading an interview with George Lucas just prior to the release of The Phantom Menace. Lucas asked which dream pieces of technology he’d like to see - he spoke about infinite storage and a camera that could capture scenes as 3D models.
I think his wish may have come true - a few days ago, O’Reilly’s Brady Forrest wrote about Advanced Scientific Concepts’ LADAR cameras, capable of capturing all the necessary information, in a single shot, to enable te creation of a 3D model.
This is an astonishing development and one which could have profound implications for mapping, movie-making, military applications and of course, messaging.
In just a half decade we’ve seen cameraphone technology evolve from smugdy sub-VGA quality to Carl-Zeiss equipped 5 megapixel cameras. Will we eventually see LADAR-equipped phones?
What the implications of LADAR will be on photo-messaging as costs fall to consumer levels? Coupled with Geovector’s ‘pointable’ phones, locative services and even left-field concepts like Sascha Pohflepp’s Buttons, it’s not difficult to see the evolution of cameraphones into more than just image capture devices, but evolving rapidly into rich context capture devices.
