2022-09-08 Steve Feller, Founder

I used to think that telling someone “May you live in interesting times” was a curse of sorts since the “uninteresting times” of peace and tranquility are usually much preferred over times of trouble and strife. However, the unprecedented evolution of technology over the last several decades and the endless opportunities and anxieties it brings has been riveting, fascinating, and engaging to watch. It is safe to say that even in this period of relative stability and prosperity, the times are interesting indeed. This post provides an overview of my experience with camera array imaging systems and how this technical evolution is leading to exciting new and unexpected capabilities and challenges.

I’ve been living in interesting times for most of my professional career. I started studying computer engineering in 1992, which coincidentally happened to be around the same time as three major technological advances: the first commercial digital cameras went on sale in the United States (1990), cluster computing or systems using multiple computers simultaneously, were becoming mainstream (1994), and the first OpenGL library for graphics rendering was developed (1992). Initially these innovations may seem unrelated, but collectively they provided unprecedented opportunities and challenges for content generation, data management, and user interactions. Digital cameras acquire images in digital form and provide processing and storage needed to generate single pictures or video streams. Connecting multiple cameras to multiple computers provides multiple simultaneous views of a scene. Cluster computing provided the communication and processing backend to share images acquired arrays of cameras for deeper analysis. With an increase in the number of image streams, this computation along with the processing capabilities of dedicated graphics cards are needed for data fusion and visualization. These technologies are fundamental to most camera array systems, including many of the projects I’ve been involved with such as the Argus imaging array, the AWARE gigapixel cameras, and Aqueti imaging systems.

With over 25 years of experience developing and managing camera arrays, I still get excited when I think about the broad range of applications for these systems across multiple fields and how their potential is only beginning to be realized. However, we must proceed with caution as the technical capabilities of these systems come up against their social, psychological, and environmental impact. These are interesting times indeed.