Hasta La Gadget!

CameraBag, one of the most successful photo-processing applications on the iTunes Store, has made the transition to the Mac, and manages to get almost everything wrong.

CameraBag on the iPhone takes pictures from your Camera Roll and processes them to look like pictures taken with old film cameras. The names of the filters give away the models they mimic: Helga, Lolo, Instant and so on. On the iPhone this is fantastic, as the quick-and-dirty snaps you take there are wonderfully suited to this treatment. It also costs just $2, and has a handsome, simple, iPhone-esque interface.

Over on the Mac the problems start after downloading. There is no trial period at all. Launch CameraBag and you are prompted to enter name and serial number, with the application interface peeking tantalizingly from behind this dialog box. If you choose not to, the app quits. We know that, on the iPhone, there is no try-before-you-buy, but this is the Mac, sonny-boy, and we do things different over here.

Next is the interface, neither as elegant as the iPhone version, nor anything like what a Mac user would expect. It looks more like a Java app written for a PC. Thankfully, the results are fine, but we wonder why you would buy this when it costs $20. That’s a lot of money for something that works better on your phone, and for one tenth the price.

Product page [Nevercenter]

A chip inside the eye that can help blind people see again is moving closer to reality as researchers at MIT work on a retinal implant that can bypass damaged cells and directly offer visual input to the brain.

Patients who receive the implant will wear a pair of glasses that has a tiny camera attached to it. The camera will send images to a microchip implanted in the eyeball that channels the input to the brain.

It won’t entirely restore normal vision, say the researchers, but it will offer just enough sight to help a blind person navigate a room.

“If they can recognize faces of people in a room, that brings them into the social environment as opposed to sitting there waiting for someone to talk to them,” says Shawn Kelly, a a researcher in MIT’s Research Laboratory for Electronics and a member of the project.

MIT’s latest quest should be of interest to people like Rob Spence, a Canadian filmmaker who is on a quest to put a tiny wireless video camera into his empty right eye socket. Spence is looking to capture the world around him and a retinal implant like that from MIT could actually help bring him closer to his quest.

Here’s how the implant works. The glasses that patients wear contains a coil that wirelessly transmits power to receiving coils surrounding the eyeball. The eyeball holds a microchip encased in a sealed titanium case to avoid damage from water seepage. The chip receives visual information and activates electrodes that in turn fire the nerve cells that carry visual input to the brain.

A research team, led by MIT professor of electrical engineering John Wyatt, plans to start testing the prototype in blind patients within the next three years.

With feedback, researchers can configure the algorithm implemented by the chip to produce useful vision. Ultimately, the goal is to produce a chip that can be implanted for at least 10 years.

It’s a risky and challenging procedure as researchers have to design an implant that won’t damage the eye. In the October issue of the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering journal, researchers have said they hope to attach the implant to the outside of the eye, and put the electrodes behind the retina.

EDITOR’S NOTE 9/24/2009: As several commenters have pointed out, similar research predates the MIT prototype described here. For example, UC Santa Cruz electrical engineering professor Wentai Liu first installed a retinal implant in 2002. Also in 2002, Wired reported on a brain implant designed by William Dobelle that promised to restore sight. All of these projects, as well as MIT’s, are freaking amazing.

Photos: Models of the retinal implant/MIT

It appears that Russian billionaires aren’t the only people using infrared light to foil sneaky photographers. Sharp, the electronics company, has teamed up with the Japanese National Institute of Informatics to protect cinema screens from piracy.

It works like this: Behind the screen sit IR lamps, which pulse ten times a second. The light makes its way through the perforations in the screen (there to let sound through from theater speakers). The light, which is invisible to human eyes, happily pollutes the images being recorded by nefarious, society-destroying pirates.

As you can see in the appropriately low-quality picture above, the lights make a pattern on the picture. This will not deter anyone, of course. People willing to sit through a screener (a movie grabbed with a snuck-in camera) already deal with shaky pictures, sound interrupted by popcorn munching and general poor quality. Adding a few dots will make little difference to the already poor experience.

This tech could join the equally ineffective watermarking of movies to track the “theft” to an individual theater. These measures will do nothing to combat the perceived billion dollar losses of the movie industry. We have a better idea. Quit whining and make downloads available day-and-date with theater releases. Because right now the only option is BitTorrent.

IR light from behind the cinema screen prevents pirates from recording films at movie theaters [Far East Gizmos via the Giz]

Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich has a rather curious new addition built in to his latest oversized yacht. The 557-foot boat Eclipse, the price tag of which has almost doubled since original plans were drawn to almost $1.2 billion, set sail this week with a slew of show-off features, from two helipads, two swimming pools and six-foot movie screens in all guest cabins, to a mini-submarine and missile-proof windows to combat piracy.

It might not seem like somebody with such ostentatious tastes would crave privacy, but along with these expensive toys, Ambramovich has installed an anti-paparazzi “shield”. Lasers sweep the surroundings and when they detect a CCD, they fire a bolt of light right at the camera to obliterate any photograph. According to the Times, these don’t run all the time, so friends and guests should still be able to grab snaps. Instead, they will be activated when guards spot the scourge of professional photography, paparazzi, loitering nearby.

We dig it, although the British courts might not be so pleased. UK photo magazine Amateur Photographer asked a London lawyer about the legalities of destroying photos from afar. Here’s what he said: “intermeddling with goods belonging to someone else, or altering their condition, is a trespass to goods and will entitle the photographer to claim compensation without having to prove loss.”

Any sentence containing the word “intermeddling” is of course wonderful. The lawyer spoils it somewhat by (inevitably) mentioning James Bond and mixing up lasers with laser guns: “I would also be worried that lasers cause collateral damage, both to the camera and/or the claimant’s health.”

Roman Abramovich zaps snappers with laser shield [Times]

Celebrity Photographer ‘Laser Shield’ – Is It Legal? [Amateur Photographer]

Top photo: An older ship owned by Abramovich’s, Pelorus, which is only 377 feet long and lacks anti-CCD lasers. Photo credit: Alexander Andreev/Flickr

What do you do if you drop a camera lens on the sidewalk and hear the sickening crack as the glass elements break into useless crystal fragments? If you’re me, you stand there, crying, until a passerby comes to give you a reassuring hug. If you are tough-guy Pat Joyce, from St. Albans in the UK, you suck it up and make a fisheye lens.

Admittedly, Pat didn’t actually break his own lens. He picked up a pre-broken Sigma 28-200 from the camera store in nearby Watford for £5 ($8). He took an unbroken element and added a short tube to keep the lens at the right distance from the front of his camera, a compact Canon Ixus 65. This in turn was flipped into macro mode to take the shots.

The pictures are surprisingly good, and the lens pulls in a huge field of view, just like a real fisheye — you can see the whole gallery of Pat’s pictures and even a time-lapse video over on Flickr. Thus, we learn a lesson. If you break something, don’t stand there blubbing like a stupid little baby. Instead, take the parts and get hacking.

Cheap Fisheye [Flickr via DIY Photography]

Photos: Pat Joyce/Flickr