Angry Robot

Future Photography

With regards to Google Glass, Adam Mathes writes:

The idea of a camera that is always ready to take a photo of exactly what you are looking at seems so powerful to me, with the capacity to change the way we think about photography and videography.

And it’s not hard to take that a step further and imagine an always on camera that has a buffer of the last few minutes — with a single action you mark that frame of time to review later and it’s saved.

That’s the key, there. Saying “OK Glass, take a picture” is too clunky. But if I tapped on my watch whenever I wanted to save something that happened in the last five minutes, I could see that working. Google Glass right now is a bizarre thing, a step towards making computers less visible that actually makes them more so.

Interesting to think of photography as one of those jobs that humans just won’t do in the future. We’ll only “curate” machine photography, and even that I expect will be increasingly automated. “Save any footage of my baby laughing, and in a month, edit it together and post it to whatever hideous Mega-Facebook all the cyborgs are using.”