TOKYO, Sept 14 — Every five years, Canon tours the world with a special expo, showing off the craziest technologies its research teams have concocted. While some of the products will be coming to store shelves soon and others are there purely for bragging rights, it’s not always clear which is which. From videos shot in pitch black conditions to one massive print that made me feel queasy, Canon put forth some show-stoppers this year. Here are the five things to watch for in the cameras of tomorrow.
1. Crazy Resolution
It was at the 2010 Expo that Canon started showing off 4K resolution cameras and displays, the next frontier after HD went mainstream. Those aren’t quite commonplace yet, but they’re certainly circulating, and the technology comes in many forms. I mean, the newest iPhone shoots 4K video. This year Canon substantially upped the ante with 8K video. This is 16 times the resolution of 1080p full HD, and it is every bit as overwhelming as you’d expect. To shoot in 8K, Canon developed a sensor to grab the images and an array of multiple 4K image processors to handle them.
The cameras and displays are still both prototypes, so I didn’t get to tinker much, but it was an experience just to look at the 8K displays. Images seem almost too realistic. Because your eye doesn’t naturally pick up that much detail, it feels jarring. When you can take a magnifying glass to the screen, what you see isn’t pixels jumping out; you just see more detail. On the bird shown above, I could get down to the texture on individual hairs before my eyes started to fail me. Who knows if this will ever make it into mainstream consumer TVs and monitors? I’ve sure got my fingers crossed.
2. Shooting in the dark
Low light is the bane of smartphone shooters and professional photographers alike. The darker it is, the harder it is to get something worth showing. Blacks end up full of haze, colours are washed out, and your subject is a blurry, fuzzy mess. For videographers though, there is often no option at all. Canon solved this with a little black-box camera that shoots in full HD, up to ISO 4,000,000. (ISO is what determines the level of light sensitivity; a very advanced consumer camera these days can crank up to 64,000 ISO, with unimpressive results.)
At the Expo demo, the camera was trained on the inside of a camping tent I couldn’t see inside with the naked eye. The monitor above my head, however, clearly showed a child’s toy, using only a standard lens, with the camera’s sensor cranked up to less than a quarter of its maximum sensitivity. The eventual goal is to get cameras like this into the hands of spelunkers and deep-sea divers so they can shoot in pitch-black environments without external lights. Imagining such a technology in a GoPro-like form factor gives me goosebumps.
3. Mixed reality
Everyone’s trying to get in on the virtual reality game, and Canon’s no different. The brand is calling this particular flavour of VR “mixed reality” because it incorporates physical attributes of the surrounding environment into simulations. While you might watch an immersive movie on your Samsung Gear VR, or play a video game on an Oculus Rift, Canon Mixed Reality is more a tool than a diversion.
In a number of demos, Canon demonstrated how a combination of a stereoscopic headset, specially created hand-held tools, and mounted camera systems can be used to enable virtual prototyping and job training. On the glamorous side, Embraer Jets is using a version of mixed reality to let jet designers configure and alter interiors for new planes without having to weld a single thing. Probably more significant, though, is a training program for oil rig workers (which you can see above), in which a green screen room is fitting with actual panels, switches, and tools, and a person can be trained far from the dangers of an actual rig. You could someday experience a mixed-reality section during a job interview.
4. Looking to the stars
Canon’s also developing equipment for looking at more than what’s here on earth. It is already supplying traditional glass lenses for the Subaru telescope in Hawaii (named for a star system, not the automaker), where a single element can be a few feet across. But when a telescope gets to a certain size, glass no longer suffices; you can’t create or focus lenses that are big enough. That’s when you switch to using mirrors.
When completed, the primary mirror on the Thirty Metre Telescope (TMT) will have 492 panels, each of which can be adjusted individually. A single mirror is a metre and a half across, and the model of the telescope here is at 1/150 scale. The TMT is being built in Pasadena, California, but the components are being made by suppliers across the world because the telescope is a cooperative project. Canon is making 30 per cent of the panels on the main mirror, the largest share from any supplier. You can see, in the cutaway above, all the machinery necessary to allow the panels to move and focus light coming from distant stars and other objects. It’s a far cry from that compact camera you’re carrying.
5. Printing
This is not a photograph I took from a rooftop in midtown Manhattan. This is a photograph of a composite print that rolled off an experimental, 44-inch inkjet printer. The printer has incredible colour fidelity and creates prints that, under the right lighting conditions, allow your eyes to perceive depth as they normally do. When I stepped up to a railing and looked down at this picture, I actually felt my knees go weak. I had to think again about what I was looking at.
People still print family photos, despite what you might think viewing Facebook. A new technique called Super Creative Printing is cool enough to make me forgive the terrible name. It uses a process similar to 3D printers to deposit layers of ink on an aluminium composite board, hardening each with UV light before moving on to the next. The result is photographs that have actual depth, instead of just simulating it. While it’s a little creepy up close, from a distance the photos look as realistic as any I’ve ever seen. — Bloomberg
