4 Photo Technologies You Need to Know

The following 4 photo-related technologies are cool and quickly slipping into the marketplace. Some are already in heavy rotation, some are in development, others are in still in commercial viability studies. I thought you’d appreciate an aggregate of them into one post for your speedy perusal.

1) Canon Takes Copyright Protection to the Next Level

By scanning the iris of your eye and embedding your biological information into your images, Canon’s looking to help you protect your pictures: “…to provide an imaging apparatus that makes it possible to protect the copyright of photographic images by reliably acquiring biological information of a photographer…” – US Patent Application No. 2008/0025574
(Via my friend Milo at first, then slashdot)

2) GumGum’s New Image Licensing Model (at last!)

Offline, content is licensed for a finite period of time to a predictable audience. Online, content lives forever and usage is unknown. This raises the question: How do you fairly monetize a license when circulation is unpredictable? GumGum distributes, tracks and monetizes every view a piece of content receives online. Why has this taken so long? No matter, it’s here now. Nice job, GumGum. Let’s get this technology some legs…
(Via TechCrunch)

3) Stanford Smarties Have Been Busy with Make3D

Make3D converts your single picture into a 3-D model. It takes a two-dimensional image and creates a three-dimensional “fly around” model, giving the viewers access to the scene’s depth and a range of points of view. You can upload your pictures and/or swipe the code (cc license) to work on it yourself. It has some really interesting potential.
(via my buddy Michael)

4) Photosynth: University of Washington Joins Forces with Microsoft

Ever wondered what it would be like to walk through your digital photos in 3D, or, even more interesting, wanted to share the perspectives of a hundred other visitors to the same location, even uniting all that data into one image? That’s Photosynth.
(Via my own damn experience – this thing is hot, I’ve played around with it.)