Photo Technology Comes Into Focus
October 31, 2011 by Nicholas Davison
In traditional photography, you have to choose a focal point. Everything in front and behind that point progressively moves more and more out of focus. This process can slow photographers down and sometimes cause you to miss the action, either as your camera hunts for too long or focuses on the wrong point, leaving you with a useless image.
But, recently Lytro announced their new Light-Field camera. With a light-field (or ‘plenoptic’) camera, you can take the shot without worrying about focus and then adjust the focus to your heart’s content, later. You can see this in action here. Just click on the part of the image you want to focus (requires Flash).
This is all cool stuff but we’re still in early days of this technology…
In order to gain the ability to store all possible focal depths, we’re essentially trading resolution. As an example, Stanford University researchers used a 16 megapixel camera and, after creating ~175 pixel microlenses to create the light-field data, were left with only a 90 kilopixel final resolution (back in the bad old days of 640x480 cameras, we still had 307 kilopixels, albeit with a single focal point).
There is a solution that allows for higher resolution images but it comes at the cost of unwanted aliasing artifacts. So, do you trade resolution for “truer” images or gain resolution at the risk of more distortion in certain cases?
Nicholas Davison Director of Web Development
Read more from the Engineering category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS, or you can Trackback from your site.
Accessibility: Critical SEO?
December 06, 2010 by Nicholas Davison
I'd like to propose a thought experiment: Think of Google, Bing and others not as search engines that crawl the web but as disabled users.
Nicholas Davison Director of Web Development
Read more from the Engineering category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS, or you can Trackback from your site.
Digitaria Playground – HTML5/JavaScript Image Editor
November 18, 2010 by Nicholas Davison
Canvas had, I’ll be honest, kind of bored me so far. Really? We’re back to drawing primitive lines, rectangles and arcs? In the great Flash vs. HTML5 debate, despite being an HTML guy, my feelings had been, “Not much is going to happen until there’s a tool as easy as Flash’s for building something interesting.”
Then I came across getImageData and putImageData.
A Sunday afternoon's playing around later, I had a kind of cool image editor.
Nicholas Davison Director of Web Development
Read more from the Engineering category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS, or you can Trackback from your site.
Accessible HTML5 Video
October 18, 2010 by Nicholas Davison
How would you feel if I told you that I had a web solution that could get you good publicity, improve your SEO, avoid the risk of getting sued and, best of all, I made it easy for you?
With accessible HTML5 video, we can give you all of that. This post shows you how.
Nicholas Davison Director of Web Development
Read more from the Engineering category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS, or you can Trackback from your site.
HTML5 Video & Skinning Tutorial Part 5: Sound
June 28, 2010 by Nicholas DavisonLast Thursday, we covered interactive progress bars.
Today we will be covering sound – muting, un-muting and adjusting the volume of our videos.
Throughout these tutorials, we will be continuing the concepts/implementation division: Explaining the ideas first, letting those who wish to run ahead do so – then going over a step by step implantation with jQuery.
Nicholas Davison Director of Web Development
Read more from the Engineering category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS, or you can Trackback from your site.
HTML5 Video & Skinning Tutorial Part 4: Interactive Progress Bars
June 24, 2010 by Nicholas Davison
Today we will be covering progress bars – updating them as the video plays and letting users jump to any position along them.
Throughout these tutorials, we will be continuing the concepts/implementation division: Explaining the ideas first, letting those who wish to run ahead do so – then going over a step by step implantation with jQuery.
Nicholas Davison Director of Web Development
Read more from the Engineering category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS, or you can Trackback from your site.
HTML5 Video & Skinning Tutorial Part 3: Rewind/Fast Forward
June 23, 2010 by Nicholas DavisonYesterday we covered setting up a play/pause button that controls an HTML5 element.
Today we will be expanding that code, adding rewind and fast forward buttons. We will also be looking at the limitations current player implementations provide and how they affect us.
Nicholas Davison Director of Web Development
Read more from the Engineering category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS, or you can Trackback from your site.
HTML5 Video & Skinning Tutorial Part 2: Play Buttons
June 22, 2010 by Nicholas DavisonYesterday we covered the core HTML5 <video> element and its basic implementation.
Today we will be looking at everything involved with creating a separate, skinned play button: controlling the video and tracking its current state in order to update the video correctly.
Nicholas Davison Director of Web Development
Read more from the Engineering category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS, or you can Trackback from your site.
HTML5 Video & Skinning Tutorial Part 1
June 21, 2010 by Nicholas DavisonWelcome to the first part of a week long series looking at the HTML5 Video tag and how to skin it.
A lot of people are talking about how great HTML5 Video is, how it will be a game changer, and how it [debatably] does away with the need for Flash. Fewer are covering how to actually use it, and those that do tend to stop at showing you how to put the basic tag on to a page. That might be enough for casual bloggers and basic sites, but for it to stand any chance of replacing Flash on professional sites it needs to be able to replace Flash’s ability to skin the players as well. This week of articles will teach you how to do all of that.
Nicholas Davison Director of Web Development
Read more from the Engineering category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS, or you can Trackback from your site.
HTML5: What Has Changed and How To Adopt It
June 11, 2010 by Nicholas DavisonWrapping up our week long series on HTML5: What has changed from HTML4 to HTML5: changed elements, removed elements as well as new, changed and removed attributes. We will also discuss how to adopt HTML5.
Nicholas Davison Director of Web Development
Read more from the Engineering category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS, or you can Trackback from your site.