Image

Dark energy has been described as the greatest puzzle of our universe. This mysterious force, discovered in 1998, is pushing the universe apart at ever-increasing speeds and astronomers have now devised a new method of measuring it. Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers were able to take advantage of a giant magnifying lens in space – a massive cluster of galaxies – to narrow in on the nature of dark energy. Their calculations, when combined with data from other methods, significantly increase the accuracy of dark energy measurements and may eventually lead to an explanation of what the elusive phenomenon really is. Read More

Japan’s national public broadcaster, NHK, has developed a “millimeter-wave TV camera” that operates under the same principle as radar, taking images using radio waves instead of visible light. The technology allows objects hidden behind obstacles such as smoke, fog or even plywood to be captured as live, moving images. Read More

If you’re a fan of Adobe’s indispensable digital darkroom software, Lightroom then chances are you might have already had a nose around some of its new features and improvements in the beta. Although most of the major updates were introduced during this public pre-release we’re pleased to say a few more features have come to light in the final version announced today. Read More

Following the release of the GigaPan EPIC and EPIC 100, GigaPan Systems has upped the ante with the introduction of the EPIC Pro. As the Pro of its title suggests, the latest robotic camera mount to help take panoramic gigapixel composite pictures is designed to work with most DSLR cameras with its ability to hold a camera and lens combination up to 10lbs. Read More

The basis of most 3D systems is to "trick" our eyes into believing that an image shown on a flat screen has three dimensions, but what if you could throw away the screen entirely! It sounds simply too far-fetched and impossible to choreograph, but that's exactly what researchers MIT's SENSEable City Lab and Aerospace Robotics and Embedded Systems Laboratory (ARES Lab) have created with Flyfire - a cloud of LED-carrying micro-helicopters controlled in synchrony to show unique animated light displays in three-dimensional space. Read More

If you’ve ever tried to get that perfect shot of a race car, athlete, wild animal, or any other fast-moving subject, you know how hard it can be - what are the odds that you’ll hit the shutter release button at just the right instant? You could try videotaping it and grabbing a still afterward, but chances are it will be grainy and blurry. It’s a common problem, but it might have just been solved. Medical researchers have developed a digital photographic technique that allows users to simultaneously shoot high-speed (slow motion) video and high-resolution stills, via the same sensor on the same camera. Read More

Panasonic has revealed a new addition to its LUMIX family of cameras, the DMC-ZR3 slim compact digital. The successor to the ZR1, optical zoom has been boosted to eight times, the addition of AVCHD Lite video should extend recording time, the pixel count now stands at 14 megapixels and it supports the new SDXC card format. Read More

Forget looking at the world through rose colored glasses – try these on for size. Video eyewear manufacturer Vuzix has unveiled its Wrap 920AR glasses prototype that features cameras mounted to the lenses that project real world images onto LCD’s inside the glasses, seamlessly mixing real-world and computer generated imagery.

With the LCD’s offering the view of a 67” display from ten feet away and the cameras able to capture video at a resolution of 752x480 at 60fps, the application promises a myriad of uses from gaming to education and social networking. Read More

No longer just a device intended to capture images, the digital camera becomes a veritable pocket photo album with the latest offering from Kodak, the Slice Touchscreen. Featuring a 3.5” LCD touchscreen 5X optical zoom and 14MP resolution, the Slice also packs a 2GB internal memory with tagging functionality. This not only recognizes up to 20 faces allowing the user to tag photos by person, place, date or occasion, but also lets the user tag photos for easy uploading to sites like Flickr and Facebook. Read More