March 28, 2024

Archives for November 2008

The future of photography

Several interesting things are happening in the wild world of digital photography as it’s colliding with digital video. Most notably, the new Canon 5D Mark II (roughly $2700) can record 1080p video and the new Nikon D90 (roughly $1000) can record 720p video. At the higher end, Red just announced some cameras that will ship next year that will be able to record full video (as fast as 120 frames per second in some cases) at far greater than HD resolutions (for $12K, you can record video at a staggering 6000×4000 pixels). You can configure a Red camera as a still camera or as a video camera.

Recently, well-known photographer Vincent Laforet (perhaps best known for his aerial photographs, such as “Me and My Human“) got his hands on a pre-production Canon 5D Mark II and filmed a “mock commercial” called “Reverie”, which shows off what the camera can do, particularly its see-in-the-dark low-light abilities. If you read Laforet’s blog, you’ll see that he’s quite excited, not just about the technical aspects of the camera, but about what this means to him as a professional photographer. Suddenly, he can leverage all of the expensive lenses that he already owns and capture professional-quality video “for free.” This has all kinds of ramifications for what it means to cover an event.

For example, at professional sporting events, video rights are entirely separate from the “normal” still photography rights given to the press. It’s now the case that every pro photographer is every bit as capable of capturing full resolution video as the TV crew covering the event. Will still photographers be contractually banned from using the video features of their cameras? Laforet investigated while he was shooting the Beijing Olympics:

Given that all of these rumours were going around quite a bit in Beijing [prior to the announcement of the Nikon D90 or Canon 5D Mark II] – I sat down with two very influential people who will each be involved at the next two Olympic Games. Given that NBC paid more than $900 million to acquire the U.S. Broadcasting rights to this past summer games, how would they feel about a still photographer showing up with a camera that can shoot HD video?

I got the following answer from the person who will be involved with Vancouver which I’ll paraphrase: Still photographers will be allowed in the venues with whatever camera they chose, and shoot whatever they want – shooting video in it of itself, is not a problem. HOWEVER – if the video is EVER published – the lawsuits will inevitably be filed, and credentials revoked etc.

This to me seems like the reasonable thing to do – and the correct approach. But the person I spoke with who will be involved in the London 2012 Olympic Games had a different view, again I paraphrase: “Those cameras will have to be banned. Period. They will never be allowed into any Olympic venue” because the broadcasters would have a COW if they did. And while I think this is not the best approach – I think it might unfortunately be the most realistic. Do you really think that the TV producers and rights-owners will “trust” photographers not to broadcast anything they’ve paid so much for. Unlikely.

Let’s do a thought experiment. Red’s forthcoming “Scarlet FF35 Mysterium Monstro” will happily capture 6000×4000 pixels at 30 frames per second. If you multiply that out, assuming 8 bits per pixel (after modest compression), you’re left with the somewhat staggering data rate of 720MB/s (i.e., 2.6TB/hour). Assuming you’re recording that to the latest 1.5TB hard drives, that means you’re swapping media every 30 minutes (or you’re tethered to a RAID box of some sort). Sure, your camera now weighs more and you’re carrying around a bunch of hard drives (still lost in the noise relative to the weight that a sports photographer hauls around in those long telephoto lenses), but you manage to completely eliminate the “oops, I missed the shot” issue that dogs any photographer. Instead, the “shoot” button evolves into more of a bookmarking function. “Yeah, I think something interesting happened around here.” It’s easy to see photo editors getting excited by this. Assuming you’ve got access to multiple photographers operating from different angles, you can now capture multiple views of the same event at the same time. With all of that data, synchronized and registered, you could even do 3D reconstructions (made famous/infamous by the “bullet time” videos used in the Matrix films or the Gap’s Khaki Swing commercial). Does the local newspaper have the rights to do that to an NFL game or not?

Of course, this sort of technology is going to trickle down to gear that mere mortals can afford. Rather than capturing every frame, maybe you now only keep a buffer of the last ten seconds or so, and when you press the “shoot” button, you get to capture the immediate past as well as the present. Assuming you’ve got a sensor that let’s you change the exposure on the fly, you can also now imagine a camera capturing a rapid succession of images at different exposures. That means no more worries about whether you over or under-exposed your image. In fact, the camera could just glue all the images together into a high-dynamic-range (HDR) image, which yields sometimes fantastic results.

One would expect, in the cutthroat world of consumer electronics, that competition would bring features like this to market as fast as possible, although that’s far from a given. If you install third-party firmware on a Canon point-and-shoot, you get all kinds of functionality that the hardware can support but which Canon has chosen not to implement. Maybe Canon would rather you spend more money for more features, even if the cheaper hardware is perfectly capable. Maybe they just want to make common feature easy to use and not overly clutter the UI. (Not that any camera vendors are doing particularly well on ease of use, but that’s a topic for another day.)

Freedom to Tinker readers will recognize some common themes here. Do I have the right to hack my own gear? How will new technology impact old business models? In the end, when industries collide, who wins? My fear is that the creative freelance photographer, like Laforet, is likely to get pushed out by the big corporate sponsor. Why allow individual freelancers to shoot a sports event when you can just spread professional video cameras all over the place and let newspapers buy stills from those video feeds? Laforet discussed these issues at length; his view is that “traditional” professional photography, as a career, is on its way out and the future is going to be very, very different. There will still be demand for the kind of creativity and skills that a good photographer can bring to the game, but the new rules of the game have yet to be written.

Total Election Awareness

Ed recently made a number of predictions about election day (“Election 2008: What Might Go Wrong”). In terms of long lines and voting machine problems, his predictions were pretty spot on.

On election day, I was one of a number of volunteers for the Election Protection Coalition at one of 25 call centers around the nation. Kim Zetter describes the OurVoteLive project, involving 100 non-profit organizations, ten thousand volunteers that answered 86,000 calls with a 750 line call-center operation (“U.S. Elections — It Takes a Village”):

The Election Protection Coalition, a network of more than 100 legal, voting rights and civil liberties groups was the force behind the 1-866-OUR-VOTE hotline, which provided legal experts to answer nearly 87,000 calls that came in over 750 phone lines on Election Day and dispatched experts to address problems in the field as they arose.

Pam Smith of the Verified Voting Foundation made sure each call center had a voting technologist responsible for responding to voting machine reports and advising mobile legal volunteers how to respond on the ground. It was simply a massive operation. Matt Zimmerman and Tim Jones of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and their team get serious props as developers and designers of the their Total Election Awareness (TEA) software behind OurVoteLive.

As Kim describes in the Wired article, the call data is all available in CSV, maps, tables, etc.: http://www.ourvotelive.org/. I just completed a preliminary qualitative analysis of the 1800 or so voting equipment incident reports: “A Preliminary Analysis of OVL Voting Equipment Reports”. Quite a bit of data in there with which to inform future efforts.

How Fragile Is the Internet?

With Barack Obama’s election, we’re likely to see a revival of the network neutrality debate. Thus far the popular debate over the issue has produced more heat than light. On one side have been people who scoff at the very idea of network neutrality, arguing either that network neutrality is a myth or that we’d be better off without it. On the other are people who believe the open Internet is hanging on by its fingernails. These advocates believe that unless Congress passes new regulations quickly, major network providers will transform the Internet into a closed network where only their preferred content and applications are available.

One assumption that seems to be shared by both sides in the debate is that the Internet’s end-to-end architecture is fragile. At times, advocates on both sides debate seem to think that AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast have big levers in their network closets labeled “network neutrality” that they will set to “off” if Congress doesn’t stop them. In a new study for the Cato Institute, I argue that this assumption is unrealistic. The Internet has the open architecture it has for good technical reasons. The end-to-end principle is deeply embedded in the Internet’s architecture, and there’s no straightforward way to change it without breaking existing Internet applications.

One reason is technical. Advocates of regulation point to a technology called deep packet inspection as a major threat to the Internet’s open architecture. DPI allows network owners to look “inside” Internet packets, reconstructing the web page, email, or other information as it comes across the wire. This is an impressive technology, but it’s also important to remember its limitations. DPI is inherently reactive and brittle. It requires human engineers to precisely describe each type of traffic that is to be blocked. That means that as the Internet grows ever more complex, more and more effort would be required to keep DPI’s filters up to date. It also means that configuration problems will lead to the accidental blocking of unrelated traffic.

The more fundamental reason is economic. The Internet works as well as it does precisely because it is decentralized. No organization on Earth has the manpower that would have been required to directly manage all of the content and applications on the Internet. Networks like AOL and Compuserve that were managed that way got bogged down in bureaucracy while they were still a small fraction of the Internet’s current size. It is not plausible that bureaucracies at Comcast, AT&T, or Verizon could manage their TCP/IP networks the way AOL ran its network a decade ago.

Of course what advocates of regulation fear is precisely that these companies will try to manage their networks this way, fail, and screw the Internet up in the process. But I think this underestimates the magnitude of the disaster that would befall any network provider that tried to convert their Internet service into a proprietary network. People pay for Internet access because they find it useful. A proprietary Internet would be dramatically less useful than an open one because network providers would inevitably block an enormous number of useful applications and websites. A network provider that deliberately broke a significant fraction of the content or applications on its network would find many fewer customers willing to pay for it. Customers that could switch to a competitor would. Some others would simply cancel their home Internet service and rely instead on Internet access at work, school, libraries, etc. And many customers that had previously taken higher-speed Internet service would downgrade to basic service. In short, even in an environment of limited competition, reducing the value of one’s product is rarely a good business strategy.

This isn’t to say that ISPs will never violate network neutrality. A few have done so already. The most significant was Comcast’s interference with the BitTorrent protocol last year. I think there’s plenty to criticize about what Comcast did. But there’s a big difference between interfering with one networking protocol and the kind of comprehensive filtering that network neutrality advocates fear. And it’s worth noting that even Comcast’s modest interference with network neutrality provoked a ferocious response from customers, the press, and the political process. The Comcast/BitTorrent story certainly isn’t going to make other ISPs think that more aggressive violations of network neutrality would be a good business strategy.

So it seems to me that new regulations are unnecessary to protect network neutrality. They are likely to be counterproductive as well. As Ed has argued, defining network neutrality precisely is surprisingly difficult, and enacting a ban without a clear definition is a recipe for problems. In addition, there’s a real danger of what economists call regulatory capture—that industry incumbents will find ways to turn regulatory authority to their advantage. As I document in my study, this is what happened with 20th-century regulation of the railroad, airline, and telephone industries. Congress should proceed carefully, lest regulations designed to protect consumers from telecom industry incumbents wind up protecting incumbents from competition instead.

Innovation vs. Safety in Self-driving Technologies

Over at Ars Technica, the final installment of my series on self-driving cars is up. In this installment I focus on the policy implications of self-driving technologies, asking about regulation, liability, and civil liberties.

Regulators will face a difficult trade-off between safety and innovation. One of the most important reasons for the IT industry’s impressive record of innovation is that the industry is lightly regulated and the basic inputs are cheap enough that almost anyone can enter the market with new products. The story of the innovative company founded in someone’s garage has become a cliche, but it also captures an important part of what makes Silicon Valley such a remarkable place. If new IT products were only being produced by large companies like Microsoft and Cisco, we’d be missing out on a lot of important innovation.

In contrast, the automobile industry is heavily regulated. Car manufacturers are required to jump through a variety of hoops to prove to the government that new cars are safe, have acceptable emissions, get sufficient gas mileage, and so forth. There are a variety of arguments for doing things this way, but one important consequence is that it makes it harder for a new firm to enter the market.

These two very different regulatory philosophies will collide if and when self-driving technologies mature. This software, unlike most other software, will kill people if it malfunctions. And so people will be understandably worried about the possibility that just anyone can write software and install it in their cars. Indeed, regulators are likely to want to apply the same kind of elaborate testing regime to car software that now applies to the rest of the car.

On the other hand, self-driving software is in principle no different from any other software. It’s quite possible that a brilliant teenager could produce dramatically improved self-driving software from her parents’ basement. If we limit car hacking to those engineers who happen to work for a handful of large car companies, we may be foregoing a lot of beneficial progress. And in the long run, that may actually cost lives by depriving society of potentially lifesaving advances in self-driving technology.

So how should the balance be struck? In the article, I suggest that a big part of the solution will be a layered architecture. I had previously made the prediction that self-driving technologies will be introduced first as safety technologies. That is, cars will have increasingly sophisticated collision-avoidance technologies. Once car companies have figured out how to make a virtually uncrashable car, it will be a relatively simple (and safe) step to turn it into a fully self-driving one.

My guess is that the collision-avoidance software will be kept around and serve as the lowest layer of a self-driving car’s software stack. Like the kernels in modern operating systems, the collision-avoidance layer of a self-driving car’s software will focus on preventing higher-level software from doing damage, while actual navigational functionality is implemented at a higher level.

One beneficial consequence is that it may be possible to leave the higher levels of the software stack relatively unregulated. If you had software that made it virtually impossible for a human being to crash, then it would be relatively safe to run more experimental navigation software on top of it. If the higher-level software screwed up, the low-level software should detect the mistake and override its instructions.

And that, in turn, leaves some hope that the self-driving cars of the future could be a hospitable place for the kind of decentralized experimentation that has made the IT industry so innovative. There are likely to be strict limits on screwing around with the lowest layer of your car’s software stack. But if that layer is doing its job, then it should be possible to allow more experimentation at higher layers without endangering peoples’ lives.

If you’re interested in more on self-driving cars, Josephine Wolff at the Daily Princetonian has an article on the subject. And next Thursday I’ll be giving a talk on the future of driving here at Princeton.

Bandwidth Needs and Engineering Tradeoffs

Tom Lee wonders about a question that Ed has pondered in the past: how much bandwidth does one human being need?

I’m suspicious of estimates of exploding per capita bandwidth consumption. Yes, our bandwidth needs will continue to increase. But the human nervous system has its own bandwidth limits, too. Maybe there’ll be one more video resolution revolution — HDTV2, let’s say (pending the invention of a more confusing acronym). But to go beyond that will require video walls — they look cool in Total Recall, but why would you pay for something larger than your field of view? — or three-dimensional holo-whatnots. I’m sure the latter will be popularized eventually, but I’ll probably be pretty old and confused by then.

The human fovea has a finite number of neurons, and we’re already pretty good at keeping them busy. Personally, I think that household bandwidth use is likely to level off sometime in the next decade or two — there’s only so much data that a human body can use. Our bandwidth expenses as a percentage of income will then start to fall, both because the growth in demand has slowed and because income continues to rise, but also because the resource itself will continue to get cheaper as technology improves.

When thinking about this question, I think it’s important to remember that engineering is all about trade-offs. It’s often possible to substitute one kind of computing resource for another. For example, compression replaces bandwidth or storage with increased computation. Similarly, caching substitutes storage for bandwidth. We recently had a talk by Vivek Pai, a researcher here at Princeton who has been using aggressive caching algorithms to improve the quality of Internet access in parts of Africa where bandwidth is scarce.

So even if we reach the point where our broadband connections are fat enough to bring in as much information as the human nervous system can process, that doesn’t mean that more bandwidth wouldn’t continue to be valuable. Higher bandwidth means more flexibility in the design of online applications. In some cases, it might make more sense to bring raw data into the home and do calculations locally. In other cases, it might make more sense to pre-render data on a server farm and bring the finished image into the home.

One key issue is latency. People with cable or satellite TV service are used to near-instantaneous, flawless video content, which is difficult to stream reliably over a packet-switched network. So the television of the future is likely to be a peer-to-peer client that downloads anything it thinks its owner might want to see and caches it for later viewing. This isn’t strictly necessary, but it would improve the user experience. Likewise, there may be circumstances where users want to quickly load up their portable devices with several gigabytes of data for later offline viewing.

Finally, and probably most importantly, higher bandwidth allows us to economize on the time of the engineers building online applications. One of the consistent trends in the computer industry has been towards greater abstraction. There was a time when everyone wrote software in machine language. Now, a lot of software is written in high-level languages like Java, Perl, or Python that run slower but make life a lot easier for programmers. A decade ago, people trying to build rich web applications had to waste a lot of time optimizing their web applications to achieve acceptable performance on the slow hardware of the day. Today, computers are fast enough that developers can use high-level frameworks that are much more powerful but consume a lot more resources. Developers spend more time adding new features and less time trying to squeeze better performance out of the features they already have. Which means users get more and better applications.

The same principle is likely to apply to increased bandwidth, even beyond the point where we all have enough bandwidth to stream high-def video. Right now, web developers need to pay a fair amount of attention to whether data is stored on the client or the server and how to efficiently transmit it from one place to another. A world of abundant bandwidth will allow developers to do whatever makes the most sense computationally without worrying about the bandwidth constraints. Of course, I don’t know exactly what those frameworks will look like or what applications they will enable, but I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to think that we’ll be able to continue finding uses for higher bandwidth for a long time.