Take Psychedelic Pictures with Your iPhone

Wired's How-To Wiki demonstrates how to exploit the iPhone's unusual shutter to take distorted photographs. The trick? Just twist your camera as you're taking a picture.

The reason? The iPhone uses a CMOS sensor, which more or less "wipes" the shutter across the sensor like a scanner rather than the circular aperture of a traditional camera. The iPhone's CMOS scanner seems to be a bit slower than, say, the CMOS sensor on your Canon camera. Therefore, as the camera is recording the image, any changes over that small but significant amount of time are recorded.

Taking a psychedelic photo is actually just as easy as it sounds (works better in bright sunlight), but read on for a quick video demonstration.

TinEye: Search the Web with images instead of words

Post a Comment

Traditionally, Web search has relied on words or queries to scan massive indexes of pages for results. Searching for images can be a little trickier though. You're often relying on the competence of whoever uploaded the shot to provide the proper file name--and in a very small percentage of cases extra hints in the metadata to help the search tool get its hooks in.

In the real world, this isn't always the case, which is why the creators of a new image search tool called TinEye have approached image search the other way around--letting you search for sites using image files you've stored locally.

Sure this seems a little backward, but the idea is to find content related to whatever pictures you've got stored on your computer, or simply discover variations of that same shot around the Web.

Wondering where else an image has appeared? TinEye will let you know. In this case it's a shot from the Fail Blog (click to enlarge).

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The tool works best with popular or otherwise well-known images. Nearly everything else I tried didn't produce much. Some of the searches with the most results have been compiled in a "cool searches" section, but typically feature well-known art or photography. The company expects to have a better set of results as its index increases in size.

One of the more interesting uses for this technology is tracking down stolen intellectual property. We often find our posts put up on small blogs that cut out the bylines and take credit. If the blogs reused whatever screenshots we've added, a tool like TinEye would track them down even if they're using slightly altered text.

While we probably wouldn't go to such lengths to hound down a screenshot, there are photographers and other content creators who would. The company has already spun its technology off as a product called PixID, but it's geared more toward larger content rights holders than small-scale bloggers.

For users who want to spend a little less time (and bandwidth) using TinEye, there's a Firefox plug-in that will add a "search for image on TinEye" option when you right-click on any picture you come across on the Web. Users can also just grab the URL and enter it, which can be helpful if you don't feel like ferrying image files back and forth.

Several sites are already using the technology behind TinEye. Digg uses it to help search for duplicate story submissions on any post that contains an image. Adobe also uses it in PhotoShop Elements to look up related images that match the colors found in your photos.

Moving forward, the company intends to add video to its repertoire, letting you see where a video has been posted regardless of what service it's hosted on. This is something I'm far more interested in seeing than photos, as the viral spread of video clips across blogs and other pages is fairly rampant. When mixed with some sort of timeline, this service could yield some great metrics for video creators and a tracking system to follow when videos have been remixed and re-edited.

The service is currently in private beta, but we've got 100 invites for Webware readers who want to give it a spin. To get yours, fill out the Wufoo form after the break.

Flickr launches video hosting

1 Comment

Update: Information about the frame rate has been updated, see more below.

Today Flickr is introducing the single biggest change to its service since launching in 2004--video. The photo service is rolling out the capability to upload video clips of up to 150MB to its paying Pro members. Free members will still be able to view these clips, but will be unable to add their own, at least for the time being.

The company has taken a very different direction than I originally imagined by limiting user video clips to just 90 seconds. It's a far cry from the arms race of higher quality and unlimited length offered by services like Vimeo, Viddler, and even YouTube to a certain degree.

That's not to say videos will look poor and grainy, though. The system has been designed to scale any clip you can throw at it, including high-definition from high-end point-and-shoot cameras or your HD-capable camcorder. The frame rate also maintains 30 FPS, which is half the speed of video captured on most modern point and shoot digital cameras, but a step up from the 12 FPS that was available while I was testing the service over the weekend.

Flickr videos can be played right in the stream of thumbnails. You can also jump to the full-quality version of it with one click.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

What Flickr is trying to do with these small clips is provide a place for people to post and share the little videos they're capturing on their digital cameras. The throwaway items that are still very watchable, but hardly worth spending the time to upload to a separate service. The company knows this move will turn many off to the new service, but as part of the Yahoo ecosystem there are important boundaries that dare not be crossed. In light of Yahoo Photos shutting down last year to make way for Flickr, the company seems to have recognized the importance of brand separation and seems intent on creating these artificial boundaries if only to keep people from being confused.

The folks at Flickr say the time limits were not a move forced from having to share company resources with Yahoo Video. Kakul Srivastava, director of product management at Flickr says Yahoo Video is all about giving people a place to create their own content channels and drop those large videos. Her vision for Flickr video is simply to popularize the longer version of photos--something they hope becomes an artistic medium, and that people simply get used to taking alongside their still photography.

So how do videos fit in with the photos? Quite well, actually. Glancing at someone's photo stream (now classified as a media stream), photos and videos sit side by side with no differentiation besides a small play button in the bottom corner of video thumbnails. Like photos, you can simply click on them to go to the page that contains all the usual things like user comments, tags, and metadata, or you can simply view the video in its thumbnail size right in the stream--complete with player controls. It's absolutely wonderful, albeit tiny.

The player is a modified version of the one found on Yahoo video with controls that fade away after a few seconds to reveal the full shot. Users can embed clips on third-party sites as they would anywhere else, and developers can pull in them in through the same data API that's helped integrate Flickr into all manner of third-party tools and services. Expect to see Flickr videos making their way to photo mashup and editing services in a few weeks--JumpCut excluded (for now at least).

Getting your videos on there in the first place is almost as easy as viewing them. Videos can be uploaded at the same time and the same way you're used to uploading your still photos. The Web uploader takes them just fine, and so does an updated version of the desktop software for PCs and Macs. Once your videos are on the service, you can't get them back to your hard drive, something I'm told will be coming later on.

Video on Flickr is off to a good start, but with the artificial time limitations, I find it to be unsuitable for most of the clips I take. For those I'd be better off uploading to a standalone video service with more generous time and file size limits. I can only imagine some of my less tech-savvy friends trying to upload a video that's slightly over the size or time limit and simply giving up. That said, power users and people who are intentionally shooting short-form video will find the service a joy.

In the future I expect Flickr to lift the size and length restrictions entirely. In my chat with Srivastava, she had alluded to as much. The company also plans to let free users upload videos later on when the platform matures.

Various specs can be found after the break. See also News.com photo guru Stephen Shankland's post on it.

* Video uploading for Flickr pro members
* The ability for free and pro members to view public video clips
* Video limits up to 90 seconds long and 150MB maximum in size
* Controls to make videos private, visible to friends and/or family, or public
* Seamless integration of videos into the photostream, along with photos
* The ability to share video clips individually, as part of a set, or embed on third-party Web sites
* Tagging and geotagging capabilities for videos
* The ability to search videos by tags and descriptions
* The ability to upload videos directly from camera phones
* The option to view videos on a full screen
* Licensing options to mark a video as 'All Rights Reserved' or designate a license through Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/)
* Application programming interface (API) for third party developers to create programs or services using authorized video submitted to Flickr
* Eight languages: English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and traditional Chinese
* Upload from the Web, from Uploadr, via email, via API
* 700 kbps
* 12 30 FPS, keyframe every 12 (fixed)
* Scaled within a 500x500 box (aspect maintained)
* Audio: 44.1 kHz, stereo, 64 kbps
* 2-pass VBR, 700 kbps

Update: One thing you might find kind of neat (I do) is the video embedding function. It's not just a standard bit of embed code; it's actually quite massive. The upside to that is that the built-in embedding tool is incredibly simple to use. You can change either the height or width and the embed code will change the other size value accordingly. There's no need to go in and change the hard code or pull out a calculator to figure out how to keep the aspect ratio.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Twiddla takes home SXSW award despite sluggish performance

Collaborative whiteboarding applications can be handy tools for small groups looking to do some brainstorming despite geographical displacement. Meet Twiddla, a free tool that lets you mark up media and live Web sites, or simply organize ideas together on a virtual whiteboard. It also tacks on live communication with text chat and free VoIP conference calling that doesn't require additional plug-ins or software.

The application won an award for technical achievement at last night's SXSW Interactive Web Awards. While technologically fantastic, in my testing I ran up against some noticeable speed and local resource problems. At times I found the application to be nearly unusable despite its simple interface and snappy menus. At other times it was incredibly responsive.

In any case, Twiddla's packing a lot of features that might attract users of premium paid collaborative services such as ConceptShare and Octopz who are seeking a very simple way to get feedback on Web design or photography. It could also easily replace WebEx for a large number of people who use the tool simply for its text chat and shared work space.

One of Twiddla's killer applications is the built-in screenshot tool. It will snap the current iteration of the whiteboard and save it into both your saved media folder and the meeting's history archive. For photo or Web design consulting, this gives you the option of coming back to a work space and editing content asynchronously.

I'm holding off on giving Twiddla a thumbs up for the time being. It simply didn't perform as well as I think it should to make me ditch some of the alternatives. However, I'm happy to see some little guys come up and show WebEx and others like the recently Google-acquired Marratech what can be done on the user interface side to make these tools simple and attractive.

Read Web pages at the same time with others, and make live markups to a site on the fly. You can also chat live with others either via text or VoIP conference calling.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Let's get this out of the way before I go any further. Poodz is a terrible name for a start-up, but I'm willing to give the founders a break since the more understandable Podz.com is parked, and the developers are French--so maybe there's something lost in translation. The default brown on brown color scheme however might be in poor taste.

The service is best described as a Twitter that adds photos, videos, and sound clips. This can be managed over the web or on your mobile phone. Any combination of content can be sent via MMS, which includes whatever videos or photos you've captured on your mobile device. The entire operation is similar to Pownce, in throwing mixed media sharing together into one big pool and seeing what happens.

While the site is entirely in French, once you've registered you can swap back and forth between French and English localizations; however, users of both languages are kept in the same pool, which can result to some trips to Google Translate or simply ignoring responses or messages you don't understand.

Poodz lets you pick what type of content you want to microblog. In this case it's video.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Poodz does a few things better than the competition. For one, it's got tags and a robust search engine. While the search engine is limited to users and channels (more on those later), the tags are really well implemented and let you dig through posts you've made quickly and easily. It's also very good about separating your post types, by placing little photo, video, text, and audio icons to the left of each of your post. Each of these also constitutes a specific RSS feed, so if you felt like only subscribing to a friend's video feed, you could skip the other message types entirely. You can also take any audio or video recorded on the site and embed it elsewhere. Twitter-a-holics can even plugin their login and cross-post messages to the service every time they tweet.

The other key differentiator is the integrated social discussion network called channels. It's the equivalent of e-mail newsgroups, but it uses the same system as the content posting, letting members post whatever they want as long as it has to do with the channel theme. Each channel can have casual observers, or full on moderators who get to treat the channel content like posts on their own accounts--editing and deleting at their discretion. It's an interesting concept, and something that's been a requested feature from Twitter users for a long time now.

So is Poodz worth ditching Twitter, Pownce, et al to join? While more feature rich, and customizable, the crux of these services is all about the community and where your friends are. It's an unfortunate truth that nearly all of these services face a similar battle for user attention that any other new social network has when launching in a world of giants like MySpace and Facebook. However, if Orkut's taught us anything, your service can be hot in a few specific parts of the world and do just fine.

Related: Seesmic, Utterz, and EyeJot.

Poodz shares a lot in common with other microblogging services with the exception that it lets you share audio, video, and picture files, as well as interact with others in groups both public and private.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

ShoZu introduces MMS you pay for once

ShoZu (coverage) recently added a new dimension to its multimedia messaging service--the ability to post photos and video clips to a preset cadre of destinations, while only paying for a single data transfer.

On the Web site, ShoZu users select from 30 popular sites their multimedia submissions will auto-update each time they upload an image or video. The sites include Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, plus the usual trove of blog hosting sites like TypePad, WordPress, and LiveJournal. Also fair game are personal e-mail and FTP addresses.

The new service also incorporates a tagging architecture that lets users assign tags to photos uploaded into a common group, like a pile of vacation or birthday pictures.

There are two main benefits to ShoZu's new MMS upload system. The first is simplicity--after choosing the recipients for auto-updating, you just MMS or e-mail ShoZu's processing e-mail, go@m.shozu.com, any time you want to publish. With minor tinkering, you can convert the address into a contact for a quick-launch, and if you're not sure how, ShoZu has even created a ready-made contact for you.

The second benefit is monetary. Since your MMS merely tells ShoZu to push media to your pre-chosen upload package, you only pay for one message total. The set-up is similar to Utterz, which also supports voice and text pushes.

 

Category: Digital Photography, Mobile, Social Network & groups Tags: ShoZu, MMS

Gizmoz rolls out new face mapping video service

Michael Arcelay's Movie Debut

We're total suckers for video products that let us use our face. A few months back Caroline put my head on a woman's body with the launch of JibJab's Starring You service, and a shortly before that Rafe played around with Fix8, which lets you overlay live video with avatar and object overlays. Both are vastly different technologies, but the idea is the same--quick entertainment with very little effort on the part of the end user. Along the same lines, Gizmoz, which has been providing 3-D facemapping technology to the masses since late May, is launching a new product this morning called "be a star."

Be a star is essentially a really simple way to insert yourself into a variety of clips from TV shows, movies, and music videos. Using the same technology found in their basic talking avatar service, Gizmoz will take any photo of someone's face you throw at it, and convert it into a 3-D head that's capable of minute facial movements. You can sort through clips that use just one user face, or multiples that let you add up to three different people. The resulting video can then be stuck on a social networking page, or shared with a simple link.

For now you're limited to 10 clips, but the company is planning to add more every day. Eventually Gizmoz aims to let users use the same technology on any of their videos, allowing you to paste your friend's head on the family dog, or onto the Thanksgiving turkey.

I've embedded a sample video below, which I put together in just a few minutes. The facial processor only hiccupped once, but it was due to my crummy photo of Rafe's head. If you've already got processed 3-D heads in your gallery it takes a little over a minute to put the entire thing together. My one qualm is that while depending on the original clip, the heads tend to be tiny and the video only comes in one size, although I think you'll agree this is a pretty great way to make embarrassing videos of your boss.

Be A Star

Get your own at Gizmoz.com

 

Category: Audio & Video, Content & Publishing, Digital Photography, Games & Entertainment, Social Network & groups Tags: Gizmoz, face mapping, JibJab, Avatars, facial recognition