With more than a billion people using networked, mobile, and location-aware cameras, there is a rapid evolution in activities on visual exchange front. But new-age cameras should come out of traditional technologies and adopt new generation ideas to demonstrate innovations, according to Ramesh Raskar, associate professor, MIT Media Lab and co-director, Centre for Future Storytelling.

At the MIT Technology Review's EmTech conference in Bangalore, Raskar said that over the years digital cameras have evolved, but they still carry the legacy of traditional cameras.

According to him, the current computational approaches analyse images from cameras that have only limited abilities. “A significant enhancement in the next billion cameras — to support scene analysis and mechanisms for superior metadata tagging for sharing — will bring about a revolution in visual communication,” Raskar said.

“People are evolving from being consumers of media to creators of media. Every mobile phone in India can be its own TV station in 10 years,” he said.

The capture and analysis of visual information plays an important role in photography, medical imaging, tele-presence, worker safety, scene understanding and robotics. Raskar and his team work with a goal to go beyond post-capture software methods and exploit unusual optics, modern sensors, programmable illumination, and bio-inspired processing.