In October of 2010, science fiction writer Bruce Sterling gave the keynote speech concluding the Vimeo Festival + Awards in New York. He described his prediction of the future of imaging technology. Regarding how a camera of the future may function, Sterling said:
“It simply absorbs every photon that touches it from any angle. And then in order to take a picture I simply tell the system to calculate what that picture would have looked like from that angle at that moment. I just send it as a computational problem out in to the cloud wirelessly.”
One month later, Microsoft released their new video game controller, the XBOX Kinect. Kinect is unique in that it uses a depth sensing camera and computer vision software to sense the position and actions of gamers. A group of developers released an Open Source device driver that allowed programmers to access the Kinect’s data on a personal computer.