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This image of a jaguar from a site in Manu National Park, Peru, is the 1 millionth taken with a system of camera traps.
By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News
A system of cameras set up to monitor unseen wildlife in tropical rainforests has snapped its 1 millionth image, an elusive jaguar in Peru’s Manu National Park.
Motion triggers the cameras to take a picture, allowing researchers to find out whenever elephants, wild boars, macaques and other hard-to-track tropical wildlife come into view. As the animals move, multiple images are taken, which are turned into mini movies (in the form of the beloved animated GIF).
The system, called the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) Network, is managed by Conservation International, an environmental group. The images collected provide real-time information on how wildlife and their habitat is affected by changes in climate and land use over time.
The cameras have been deployed over the past 5 years in 16 protected areas in 14 countries throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Researchers set up the cameras during the dry season in a grid pattern. Each is left alone for 30 days. Over the course of a year, each study site — containing 60 cameras — collects between 10,000 and 30,000 images.
"Looking at the sum of these data gives us a picture of how we affect these ecosystems and the ecosystem services critical to our survival, such as carbon sequestration, a stable climate, soils, and so much more," Jorge Ahumada, TEAM’s technical director, said in a news release.
Note: Animated GIFs courtesy TEAM Network.
John Roach is a contributing writer to NBC News. To learn more about him, check out his website.
A foam ball dotted with 36 cell phone cameras that simultaneously snap a photograph when it reaches the highest point of a toss is a novel way to make panoramic images.
By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News
A foam ball dotted with 36 cell-phone cameras that simultaneously snap an image when the ball reaches the highest point of a skyward toss allows for full spherical panoramas — up, down, and all points in between.
The gadget, not yet for sale, also overcomes the problem of "ghosting" that occurs when images made moments apart are stitched together to make a panorama and a person, for example, has moved.
The Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera was created as a thesis project by Jonas Pfeil at the Technische Universitat Berlin and will be presented this week at the SIGGRAPH Asia conference in Hong Kong.
It could come in handy, for example, for a climber at the top of a mountain, a couple on the beach at the sunset, or a tourist in crowded city square who wish to capture the essence of the scene around them in a way that a conventional picture simply can't.
The Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera which captures a full spherical panorama when thrown into the air.
The ball's sturdy shell, which was made with a 3-D printer, contains a lithium ion battery at its core. An embedded accelerometer detects when the ball has reached its highest point, and is hardly moving, and directs a microcontroller to trigger the cameras.
Once recovered from a photo shoot, the images are transferred via USB cable to a computer where viewers can interactively explore the captured image. It currently is capable of a single image, though the ball has a slot for a camera card.
Pfeil and his colleagues are looking for an investor or third party to help them further develop and produce a commercial version of the ball.
For those hoping for panoramic images today, msnbc.com's multimedia editors suggest checking out Microsoft's Photosynth, which stitches together images to make panoramas and spherical images and is available as a smartphone app. (Msnbc.com is a Microsoft-NBC Universal joint venture.)
Also available as smartphone apps are Panorama 360, which builds real-time panoramic images as you press the shutter button and spin around, Dermandar, which stitches together your smartphone images using online tools to create panoramas, and PanoLab, which allows for 180 degree vertical and horizontal views.
For those with a big budget, check out the $40,000 Panoscan, which creates crime-fighting-worthy 360 degree panoramic images.
John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.
Where nations used to compete to get into space, now the competition focuses on private businesses, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into next-generation spaceships. Msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle reports from inside the rocket factories on the future of spaceflight.
Media Lab postdoc Andreas Velten, left, and Associate Professor Ramesh Raskar with the experimental setup they used to produce slow-motion video of light scattering through a plastic bottle.
By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News
A new imaging system that captures visual data at a rate of one-trillion-frames per second is fast enough to create virtual super-slow-motion videos of light particles traveling and scattering through space.
For reference, light particles — photons — travel about a million times faster than a speeding bullet.
While that's fast, researchers at MIT's Media Lab have developed a system for capturing data on the movement of photons through space and time and then stitching that data together in a computer to create virtual slow-motion videos.
An imaging solution allows researchers to visualize the propagation of light at an effective rate of one trillion frames per second.
In the video above, for example, a burst of laser light is seen traveling through a soda bottle and bouncing off the cap. Other videos show a ripple of laser light move across a table, over and into a tomato, and up a wall.
"What you see in the videos is an average of many pulses," Andreas Velten, a researcher in MIT's Media Lab who is leading the effort, explained to me Tuesday. "If we capture one pulse, we don't get enough information. First of all because it is too faint and second because we only see one line at a time."
The technique to create the videos relies on what's called a streak camera. The aperture — opening — of this camera is a narrow slit that provides a reasonable field of view in the horizontal direction, but very limited view in the vertical — essentially a line, or row of pixels.
"It can only see one line, but it gives you a very high frame rate — a trillion-frames-per second," Velten said. This allows the researchers to make a movie of one scan line. Several pulses of light are used to compose each scan line movie to improve image quality, he noted.
Then, a system of mirrors in front of the camera changes the field of view slightly so that a movie of the next line can be made. The process continues for each line of a scene, such as a pulse of light moving through a bottle. Then, the computer uses all this information to create the virtual slow-motion movies.
"So what you are seeing is actually an average of many pulses, but because our camera and laser are synchronized very well, all the pulses look exactly the same," Velten said. "That's basically the trick."
According to the researchers, it takes only a nanosecond — a billionth of a second — for light to scatter through a bottle, but it takes nearly an hour to collect enough data to stitch together a video.
While watching photons move through soda bottles and across tables is visually cool and educational, the technology could be used to study the properties of materials, as well in scientific and medical imaging, even "ultrasound with light," the researchers suggest.
For more on this technology, check out the video below featuring Velten and his adviser, Ramesh Raskar.
MIT Media Lab researchers have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion frames per second. That's fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of light traveling through objects.
John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.
Where nations used to compete to get into space, now the competition focuses on private businesses, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into next-generation spaceships. Msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle reports from inside the rocket factories on the future of spaceflight.
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