The impact of a billion cellphone cameras

Twenty years from now, will all of us be news reporters and movie makers? What would be the impact of a billion cellphone cameras in the world?

Dr Ramesh Raskar, associate professor at MIT Media Lab and co-director, centre for Future Story Telling in an interaction with rediff.com said that the next goal would be to create a universal platform to share visual information.

The future would see a shift in the way people think. He says that India has a very large mobile market and each image contributed would be a drop in the ocean.

Today, what we aim at doing is to create a data base where one can sort and search images and videos as is being done with text. The idea is to create an image platform.

Flickr and Google already have online image collections and also given today's technology, satellites capture the entire city and can give pictures of streets.

Our collection would be dwarfed by the huge number of photos of people. Events would be captured in both images and video and this would be the ultimate data set or a dense sampling of the people and places.

Dr Raskar says that it is basically story telling and the intention is to create a platform that can be diffused into society.

However to a question as to what different it would be from Youtube or Flickr which already provides visual content, he says that the clips here do not have a context.

What we are trying is to create new tools so that individuals become story tellers. They could cater to a billion people or just to one person and each of the stories would have a context.

We do not aim at just news or events in this medium. It could be interpersonal messages, social messages which of all I would consider as story telling, Dr Raskar adds.

The future has a lot in store. The idea is to make it look as real as possible. The cameras of the future will exploit unusual optics and it would support scene analysis for better metadata tagging which in turn would bring about sea change in visual communication.

If billions of cameras are on at all times, would it not become a privacy issue? Dr Raskar says that privacy has always been a cat and mouse game and hopes that it is used for the right purpose.