
To own a digital camera at the end of the 1990’s was pretty unusual and expensive. Ten years later almost every gadget seems to be able to shot photos and videos – even in High-Definition …
Cheap Sensors
The arrival of cheap sensors and storage allowed cell phone and computer manufacturer to stuff a camera into almost every gadget we carry around. There are hardly any cell phones or notebooks without a cam these days.
And the Quality! There was literally an explosion of pixel power – who would today bother with a 1-Mega-Pixel-Camera? Sure pixel resolution is not everything, but the image quality has equally improved with pixel quantity.

Early Nokia prototypes …
Cheap Monitors
But the Revolution of the Pixel includes LCD monitors – which are now huge and cheap (my current 24"-Samsung-Display would have been astronomically expensive in 1999). The analogue monitor is dead – LCDs have overtaken our eyes. Their sharpness and extreme colour range has redefined our viewing habits.
Cheap Storage and Bandwidth
Big sensor create big images – but today we also have the CHEAP big memory cards, sticks and chips to store them – as well as fast broadband to send our crappy holiday shots to all our friends and social media appendices via eMail or Social Media website (like Flickr and Facebook).
The Real Changes: record anything everywhere and at anytime
Because not only Big Brother has CCTV cameras everywhere we mere mortals can and do record anything. Thanks to YouTube and Flickr (and their clones) we can and do share everything we record.
In the last ten years there has been a flood of digital videos and photos. I suspect we all shot more images and hours of footage in these last ten years with our cheap gadgets than all generations before us?!
And the pixelated flood will continue.
On the web you can videos of any occasion and situation: from airplanes crashes, terrorist attacks, amateur sex and children’s birthdays. It alls there.
I wonder how he feels about that (public) video in twenty years?
The new global sharing culture enables us to share our lives with others and see how others live their life’s. It has never been so easy to experience, study and learn the human condition.
Since we love Social Porn (<- see my essay on that subject here) this trend will continue. It’s not Big Brother watching us – we love to show ourselves and watch others. This was first limited to celebrities and personal holiday snapshots. Today we can record and broadcast our own lives 24/7 – and some people already do.
That also means that social acceptance of being watched by the government and others has risen. In a world were everybody can record, share and watch everyone the old idea of privacy is gone …

We all know what you did ten summers ago … and you will never be able to delete that image …
The Real Changes: the Web never forgets and will find you
The global visual sharing culture has just begun, already billions of images and videos are online. And the web never forgets …
In the last century your parents were probably the keepers and guardians of your embarrassing childhood shots – today compromising material will sooner or later land on the web.
Many employers as well as "friends" check on Facebook and other social media your history before they get closer.
Thanks to Geo-Tagging and Facial Recognition it will be much easier to find a specific person in a gazillion images and videos. There is no such thing as anonymity in this brave new pixel world.

Reality – captured from many slightly different perspectives.
The Real Changes: the global Big Picture and Synthesized Reality
Soon there won’t be a place that hasn’t been photographed or captured in video. We will have a complete visual memory of our planet.
But there is more: all these images and technology will not only allow us to "find" each other – it will allow us to merge all that huge image and video pool into synthesized memory spaces (<- read my essay here).
Smart software literally stitches photos into a 3D-environment and connect / compute additional information into that "space".
When you think that Google Streetview and Google Earth are pretty amazing than hold on to your socks – the new kind of search will finally feel like stranger than any science fiction movie you have seen …

Is it real or is it … HDR?
The Real Changes: Reality is not as good as High-Definition
The last ten years have also brought a different change: the way we perceive what "reality" should look like.
Cameras, monitors and videos have slowly changed from the old 4:3 format to 16:9. The future is no longer square, but widescreen …
But the sharpness, colour range and contrast of images has changed dramatically, best illustrated by so called HDR-Images.

Before and after the HDR treatment …
Similar to before mentioned synthesized memory spaces already available cameras can combine several shots into one "High dynamic range image" that looks more real than reality.
Before the arrival of digital tools (read Photoshop or Paint Boxes for professional TV and Film productions) it was very hard to manipulate images.
Today almost any cheap camera or cell phone cam offers "image improvement filters" ranging from simple red eye removal to face finders and even body slimmers.
All these technologies have changed our perception of reality: old black & white television was unreal, even analogue colour TV looks unreal to a certain degree – and so do "classic" photos.
But today’s image technology allows us to create images and videos that look and feel more real than reality, but catching and synthesizing more details, sharpness and speed than ever before.

Remember him?
The Real Changes: The Decade of Photoshop Fakery and empty Movies with too much CGI
The last ten years saw the Perfection of Fakery – thanks to tools like Photoshop, After Effects and many other image manipulation tools.
Movies like Jurassic Park and Matrix paved the way for CGI in movies – and helped the directors to tell amazing tales. But today many movies and TV shows feel boring, because there are too many "amazing effects". Special effects have turned into a big bore …
But Photoshop & Co are now also the #1 toys for Fakery – from Beauty Magazines and Advertising to Viral Videos – Fakes are now everywhere.
Every time people see today an amazing photo or video they distrust what they see: "Is it photoshopped or is it real?!"
Fakery is increasingly hard to spot and image manipulation is now standard for almost anything you see printed or on TV.
Especially advertising was always about fake reality, but now that advertised reality looks absolutely real and can be even more beautiful than ever before. Especially woman still try to "achieve" the beauty standards in advertising – but these fake beauties are unreal and do not exist … their "level of beauty" can never be reached by any real person …
LonelyGirl15 – the first YouTube Superstar?
The Real Changes: Democratization of Broadcasting
When 8 mm movies came out it was touted as the Hollywood revolution for everyone. But the technology was cumbersome, expensive and difficult to master.
Today a GOOD video camera is affordable even for amateurs and the quality is amazing. Editing and special effects software is also cheap and basically the same the real Pros in Hollywood use.
But most of all there is now a global and cheap way to show and distribute your videos: the web.
New talent and film students can create movies and no longer rely on movie theatres, Hollywood studios or TV broadcasters to bring their work to the masses.
That means there is a wider platform for artists, moviemakers and crap alike – but it is most of all a true democratization of moviemaking and broadcasting like never before.
Low Budget series like LonelyGirl15 became global brands / phenomenon’s. Becoming a superstar on a budget was no possible!

Hello Human! Do you know where are you going to?
The Real Changes: 3D-Environments and Augmented Reality will change how we deal with real life
Today we are quite used to "live" in 3D spaces, either in games or car navigation systems – not too mention Google Earth …
The visuals of Computer Games have made a huge leap forward in the last 10 years. The X-Box, Playstation 2 and Wii can deliver incredible visuals.
Games have been pushing simulated 3D worlds for now over 20 years. New games look incredibly realistic and have left it’s visually primitive forefather Pong far behind.
But 3D engines, geo-tagging, camera sensors and search engines will merge into a new technology called Augmented Reality.
Here you look at the world through a computer display – and the computer will analyze what you and it sees – and add additional information.
The simplest form of this technology have been car navigation systems, but newer versions will go much further.

This is just a simply version of AR …
They could tell you for example which people or businesses are in a building nearby, because a search engine show you all information regarding the location you are currently at – and also know thanks to other peoples computers and cell phones who is currently near that exact spot you are standing.
Like other technologies this will make us even more dependent on our little gizmos. The pocket calculator robbed us of the need to learn math. The cell phone is our external memory for phone numbers, addresses and even our schedule (be honest how many phone numbers can you remember?).

Augmented Play Time …
Most people could hardly read maps anyway, but Augmented Reality will make them totally dependent on where to go. And thanks to "smart software" it will tell them what to shop where and that the person in front of them is their wife …
Conclusion: a new form of Telepresence
We are developing a totally new visual culture. Once the invention of photography radically changed how we captured reality and made it permanent – so will the digital capture, global storage and synthesizing of photos and videos.

Everybody needs a cam like this and everybody will wear some form of camera in the future anyway …
Thanks to a coming 24/7 always-on camera capture we will also develop a new form of Telepresence we have developed in the last century: first there was the telegraph that allowed almost instant reporting of events far away. Then came the telephone and radio, which allowed us to hear live events far away. With television we suddenly had eyes and ears all over the globe. We could watch catastrophes and music concerts unfold live.
A global web connected camera network will allow us to watch anything everywhere. It is not just a network for "watching" – it also will record, store and cross connect everything it sees.

The new telepresence and visual network will let you watch such events even from "unrecorded" angles …
This global camera network is not like Big Brother – it is a decentralized sister network, which consists of millions of independent digital eyes and ears that record and record …
Like a computer game all that data can be used to replay and synthesize the events it captured.