Re-thinking Photography: What Devices should capture Visual Appearance?

"optical image capture and display". Good photography encompasses any
technical method that makes a meaningful visual experience tangible, that lets
us save, share, and manipulate what we once saw or would like to see.
Photography may soon take a great leap towards more active and direct
descriptions of visual appearance, in a more machine-readable form. By
generously applying low-cost computing and storage, the emerging field of
"computational photography" shows new classes of computer-driven devices can
better capture meaningful features for interactive exploration.
This talk broadly surveys recent progress and proposed methods here in EECS
and elsewhere. It explores novel 'computational' sensors/arrays, illuminators,
displays, probes, and expandable 'visual archive' data types that are much
richer, revealing and accessible than a simple grid of pixels. These may
permit 'thick' photographs that offer modest but interactive changes to
lighting, viewpoint, pose, and many camera parameters *after* measurements are
complete. Such visual appearance archives are especially enticing for museum
collections; I will preview our current collaborative work with the Art
Institute of Chicago (see photo), and a project beginning with the Chicago's
Field Museum as well.