
The endgame for cameras is having no camera at all - davidiach
https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/12/15267486/photography-machine-learning-future
======
d--b
This arguments only considers photography as a tool that produces images,
while ignoring that it is also a tool that records reality.

As an image production apparatus, you can replace photography by machine
learning (or really any other image creation process, drawing, painting,
raytracing, whatever), and in these cases yes, photography becomes a little
less important.

However, a photograph is not only an image, it is a trace of actual photons
that existed and imprinted a photographic material. When you look at a
photograph, you're not only looking at a picture, you're also looking at the
imprint of reality. It's the same emotional effect as looking at your kid's
hand print on paper, or wearing your grandmother's ring. There is affect
involved that comes from the reality of the experience.

A souvenir picture is not only an image that helps you remember the time when
you and your friends were doing something, it's an actual fossil of that
moment. And that's what matters in photography. And that's why it's not going
away any time soon.

~~~
839083
If you treat photos as pleasurable pictures, then machine-generated photos
will serve fine (e.g. stock photos).

What if you replace "photos" with "music", "art", or "literature"? Sure, we
will get to a point where a computer can write a symphony that fits all the
characteristics of Beethoven, or write a stylistically accurate Shakespearean
sonnet. But it won't have the weight of the artist's observations behind it.

~~~
cma
In Rio you can pay a fee to take a train up to the famous Cristo Redentor
statue, where lots of people take pictures. But all around the train station
there are little green-screen photo studios that will make a fake picture at
the Christo Redentor statue for you for a much lower fee.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
Given the choice between these options, which would you pick? Or, at what
price points would you consider each to have equal value?

1\. Train ride with half hour viewing time to observe the Cristo Redentor. No
cameras allowed.

2\. Train ride to the statue for a photo of you in front of it, but while the
camera can see both you and the statue, you can't see it from your position.

3\. Green screen photo of you artificially in front of the statue.

I think a lot of people would, if they thought about it, strongly prefer the
first option and ascribe little value to the others. But because they do have
cameras and there's an expectation that you take a picture as a tourist, they
end up viewing their trip through their camera lens or smartphone screen.

I think it would be a compelling sell if the camera app on a smartphone could
prompt users with an offer of a professional-quality photo or video
(optionally with the user green-screened in) of a concert, sporting event, or
landmark. "Studio X has a professional recording of this event from N angles
with better equipment than yours. Add this video to your library instead?"

The killer use for this might be to record/sync school concerts, plays, and
sports. So many parents with mediocre cameras all trying to capture the event,
and no good way right now to share the output.

------
iplaw
This article is lame, and would be unable to generate an accurate picture of
the actual scene. There would also be loss of detail, missing objects, missing
people, etc. It would feel immensely artificial, too.

I was also hoping for something more ambitious, such as "once you can detect
the full electromagnetic spectrum hitting your phone from any angle, you won't
need a lens to reconstruct a focused picture," as mentioned by blixt.

At a minimum, I was hoping for conceptualization and theorized advancement of
the current display-pixel-as-camera-pixel train of thought.

~~~
MarkMMullin
Actually, not true - highly probable, yes, but not true - opencv already
supports everything necessary to reproject a synthetic image based on a set of
source images. If I'm taking a picture of someone directly in front of me and
they're also visible to two cameras to my left and right in the same visual
plane as I am the solution is trivial - after that it does get to be a
question of how many camera, how much in phase, and your taste for chewing up
gazillions of machine cycles.

------
blixt
I was hoping for something more ambitious like "once you can detect the full
electromagnetic spectrum hitting your phone from any angle, you won't need a
lens to reconstruct a focused picture." The proposed idea is very tedious and
requires a tremendous amount of up-to-date data (just the open state of a door
can seriously affect the lighting conditions in a photo).

~~~
simmons
That's exactly what I was thinking, too, when I saw the picture of the back of
the phone without a camera. "Of course! The entire back of the phone could be
sprayed with nano-scale sensors that collect photons at varying angles, then
you computationally assemble these into a image, using algorithms and the
sheer number of data points to compensate for the inevitable noise! Full-field
photography, and maybe even enough parallax to capture 3D images! Brilliant!
Oh wait, that's not where he's going at all..."

~~~
natch
Yeah I was ready to point out that if you don't have a lens, it can still be a
camera.

But then it turned out to be a dishonest clickbait title with an article where
the author wasn't really thinking clearly or with any sort of deep perspective
at all about what cameras are for, or the value of what photographs of actual
messy reality deliver.

------
syphilis2
The article is a great imagining of our grim technological future. A family on
vacation crowds in front of the Parthenon among thousands of other eager
tourists posing for pictures in the rain. Sweaty, ruffled hair, exhausted
smiles (except for Suzie), the photo is sent to Google for processing. The
result is spectacular: crowds gone, scaffolding removed, sun high in the sky,
clothes unwrinkled, smiles whitened, acne softened, and everyone's face
captured at just the right moment. The $2.99 GPets add-on let's you insert the
family parrot into the picture too. Years later over dinner the family
reminisces about how fun that sunny day at the Parthenon was.

Our memory is fragile and our eyes easily deceived. I'm hopeful this
technology is introduced to the public first, so other institutions aren't
able to abuse it before most people understand how untrustworthy pictures are.

~~~
sametmax
Except that's what people want. If you do any diner with friends of familly,
people always talk of past events in a better way that it really happened. If
you go to facebook, people don't post their life, they craft the life they
want people to think they have.

Why do you think magazines use photoshop so heavily? People don't want the hot
girl spare tires. Then want the perfect hair and big boobs.

It's all fake, but it's fake that is requested and voted for with money.

The problem here is not the tool, it's what kind of society we are building.

------
XaspR8d
It strikes me that, in a world where "photos" are generated from non-optical
data, there would likely be a counter-movement of artists who deliberately
seek or build scenes that could not be generated at the time. (In some ways
this is just a continuation of our current novelty-seeking; "interesting"
images are those that you couldn't simply find on the internet.)

I don't disbelieve for a second that the expressiveness and realism of
automatically-composed images won't have a huge explosion and become part of
popular media. But I think there will be very long period during which some
datasets will be much more salient than others. Think of how many orders of
magnitude photos we have of dogs and cats compared to frogs and yaks... can
they take the camera off of a product that can't image my friends petting a
yak? I'm very curious when is enough, because the human ability to contrive
absurd scenarios is frustratingly extensive, and unique "outlier" moments are
exactly the ones many people want to capture.

Also I think I _have_ seen a similar art project like this, where the artist
took a photo album of Paris(?) and gave people "cameras" that just identified
the closest image location by GPS and would just keep regurgitating that image
no matter how many you took. I can't seem to find it now...

~~~
marcosdumay
> there would likely be a counter-movement of artists who deliberately seek or
> build scenes that could not be generated at the time.

You mean like movie computer graphics?

------
jpfed
Yeah, like when I take pictures to remember what my kids were doing that day,
really all that must be done is to extrapolate their stage of growth using
their birthday (derived from publicly available databases), infer their likely
location and pose from the sounds they are generating, etc. So much simpler
than a CCD!

------
basicplus2
This doesn't make sense to me.. is the article suggesting a picture is created
from all previous pictures taken? This would mean 1. No more new pictures in
time of how things have changed (a new building is where the car park was) and
2. My picture of thatbird that just landed on that branch is not quite going
to turn out.. hell the tree might not even be in the picture..

~~~
FroshKiller
It's talking about image synthesis. Yes, a big part of that is creating a
picture from other pictures, but there is also intelligent inference from
sensors and other data sources besides CCDs.

You're right that the idea isn't a good fit for instances like the ones you
described, but I think it certainly has applications. For one thing, you could
potentially synthesize an image of a part of a city from a particular era
taken from a point of view that no actual photograph was taken from. Instead,
it's a synthesis of contemporary photos with inferences made from contemporary
weather data, contemporary maps, potentially drawings, etc. It's an exciting
idea.

~~~
netzone
But what would the day-to-day applications of this be? I mean, if you really
needed a photo of a side of a house that is now torn down, or if you needed
"virtual" access to an unmapped/photographed area, then sure. But the article
is talking as if this is going to replace cameras for all scenarios, specially
recreational (as that's the only thing focused on in the article).

I see no exciting uses of this technology for recreational purposes. You
wouldn't be able to take a photograph of the Library of Alexandria because
that existed before we started gathering the data. And taking synthesized
photos of your trips would make no sense, why would you even take the picture
at all in that case?

My point is that it's a bad article. Technology is cool though.

~~~
QuantumGravy
It's only a bad article in the sense that it proposes synthetic photography as
a _good_ thing. The general public, however, might well embrace it one step at
a time, accepting what I agree are terrible consequences. Cameras won't go
away overnight. Lower-quality cameras instead become acceptable, as the
results are uploaded to and enhanced in "the cloud". You eventually won't be
able to capture certain images, but the predictable majority of synthetic
"photos" taken by most people will work just fine, with better quality on
cheaper, thinner devices. Heck, scatter some subtle product placement in the
results, and the whole endeavor can be subsidized. Then we ban real cameras
and end child-pornography. You're not against _that_ , are you? Finally, we
can conveniently alter any photos that might embarrass corporate or government
interests! How delightfully dystopian.

~~~
dwighttk
It's also a bad article in the sense that it proposes it as a possible thing.
Sure a few of the steps he mentions may be possible, but the assumed
conclusion of "and then there will no longer be any use case for cameras" is
absurd.

~~~
QuantumGravy
Of course it's not going to work miraculously as the author imagined; there
are enough responses here already acknowledging that it's self-evidently
absurd for replacing cameras as we know them today. My concern is that few
here are imaginative enough to separate that fact from whether or not a future
of synthetic photography could happen _anyway_.

------
fab1an
If such a database existed, I think there'd be vastly more interesting use
cases and applications implied than 'replacing an extremely specific minimal
subset of photography' \- for example, seamless visual world-travelling in VR?

------
owenversteeg
It's a fascinating idea. But at the same time all the interesting photos
aren't able to be captured this way.

Looking at my favorite photos I've taken, there are:

\- Some photos of Iran (Google, being a US company, wouldn't operate there)

\- The inside of a crashed plane

\- A closeup of a dying hummingbird

\- A laser that I use personally

\- A boat adrift in the middle of the sea

All of these moments couldn't have been taken in this method, even with a
boatload of content-aware scale and other people's photos stitched together.

------
imgabe
This doesn't seem like something people would want.

For example: Banksy just tagged a building downtown. You rush there to get
your picture in front of it. You can't take a photo of yourself with it
because it's not yet in any of the databases used by your quasi-camera to
stitch together photos.

It seems like the world is too variable for something like this to function
practically for any but the most boring photos.

~~~
QuantumGravy
In the near-term, your camera snaps a low-res image that's sufficient to
identify Banksy's work and generate a gigapixel zoom that will allow you to
appreciate it as if you were standing in a nearby window. A discerning eye
might notice the details aren't quite a 1-to-1 match, but it's close enough
for the ignorant masses to miss. You complain on HN about the inaccuracy,
finding some agreement, but within hours, future images of the same tag are
spot-on. The next time you view the image on your phone, those inaccuracies
have been corrected. If you hadn't downloaded it off your camera to show here,
there would be no evidence anything was off.

Five years later, you snap another photo of Banksy's latest, with an even
lower-res camera. Two possible outcomes:

1\. You've violated Banksy's copyright, whether he wanted that copyright or
not, and the offending image is not present in your photo. You may or may not
receive an automated warning.

2\. You've recorded a crime, the authorities are notified immediately as your
photo processes, and the image is again not present in your photo so as not to
encourage the proliferation of graffiti.

The endgame leaves you with no camera, no one cares about Banksy who's in jail
by now (with your help!), and why are you so concerned about violating
copyright and encouraging crime, anyway? Why should technology enable you to
do any such thing?

~~~
imgabe
I guess I've confused the issue with the Banksy example. Forget about that.
Say I want to take a picture of a robin on the first day of spring. I take a
picture of my deck with the robin sitting on it. This software knows I'm in my
house looking out at my deck. It knows what my deck looks like. It doesn't
know that there's a robin there at that moment, what exact location it's in,
how big it is, etc, so it's not going to be able to reproduce that.

Maybe I could carefully explain to the software, "there's a male robin in this
exact location and pose on the deck" and it could generate one, but why would
I want to do that instead of just having a regular camera?

What does this do that I can't do with a camera? It sounds like a way more
complicated, processing-intensive method to achieve an inferior result. It's a
solution in search of a problem. It's not like decent cameras are
prohibitively expensive, seeing as we've managed to include one in basically
every phone now.

Most of the pictures I'd want to take are of something unique. Software may be
able to figure where I'm standing, what permanent features are nearby, what
the weather is like, what the people I'm with look like, but it's not going to
know the transient features, like there's a lady with a weird looking hat in
the background that I wanted to capture. So, what's the point?

~~~
QuantumGravy
Nah, I got carried away, sorry.

You're right, what the author here is suggesting is not something you would
want. He's imagining a magical omniscient fantasy technology, the closest
approximation of which would leave you disappointed and robbed of agency as a
photographer.

I propose, instead, you consider the elements he stitched together to reach
his delusion and whether or not they could still lead to a very similar,
regrettable future.

------
bambax
What's described in this article is some kind of automated postcard
production: when you're at a tourists' attraction, just press a button on your
phone and it produces an image of the location (with or without an insert of
your face) based on a library of images.

But that's not really "photography" (it's to photography what miniature
plastic Eiffel towers are to architecture).

A much more interesting and much more futuristic approach would be a device
capable of recording a whole scene without a conventional sensor and lens;
something that would record photons not because it's hit by them, but because
it knows where they are.

So this device would record all the light waves's position in a scene, at a
given instant (the instant the image is taken), and then it would let you
later reconstruct / produce any image from any position in the scene, with any
kind of focus or bokeh, or whatever.

It would also let you walk into the scene like in a real "mannequin
challenge", etc.

------
pavlov
This is sort of like how the Star Trek Holodeck works as a content creation
tool.

By modern definitions, the Holodeck clearly has the functionality of a 3D
modeling tool and game engine: the crew frequently uses it to build VR
prototypes of objects, situations and entire entertainment experiences.

It doesn't offer anything that we would recognize as modeling or animation
tools, though. Instead the user describes objects and settings using any
degree of precision -- "a steel table 3 meters long", "19th century London"
\-- to get a starting point, then iteratively adjusts the result by
instructing the system.

(Nobody takes selfies on the Enterprise either. I guess they've lost their
appeal when you can always just ask the computer: "Show me myself and Geordi
smiling against a wall when we visited the Klingon High Council last year.")

------
panic
_If you insist on inserting yourself or family members into the happy tourist
snap, that shouldn 't be too much of an imposition, either: just take a bunch
of selfies in advance and the software will stitch the two images together for
you._

So what's the endgame for selfie-takers?

~~~
QuantumGravy
Selfies still work fine, they're stitched together from all those public
surveillance cameras we'll have instead.

------
middleman90
I'm afraid that the day we will have this technology, there is going to be
nothing to photograph...

------
cordite
There was a raspberry pi project with a screen, GPS, 3G which was a camera
without a lens. It would look up the closest Flickr picture to your current
location and possibly orientation from metadata and add it to your collection.
Can't seem to find it though.

------
gerbilly
Seems like another example of technology leading us further away from reality.

~~~
harryf
Reminds me of "SeeChange" from The Circle
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_\(Eggers_novel\))

------
leecarraher
so instead of snapping a picture, you just select one from the set of pre-made
professional ones. wait we've been able to do this for decades, and yet people
still take their own pictures. this is also a bastardization of what google's
gcam technology is doing. It stitches together images at various exposure
rates to get what would otherwise require a massive sensor, or a super steady
hand, it's not creating some deep learning based frankenimage, as this article
suggests.

------
tbirrell
I guess... But why?

------
drivingmenuts
If you can synthesize an experience, why bother having any real experience?

For that matter, if we can simulate the lighting, etc. of an object, to the
finest detail, why do we need the object itself?

